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Passenger Lands Plane After Pilot Collapses and Dies At the Controls
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "NBC reports that flying instructors at Humberside Airport, near the city of Hull in northeast England, told a passenger who had never flown before how to land a four-seater Cessna 172 after the pilot collapsed and died at the controls. Passenger John Wildey explained to air traffic controllers that he had no flying experience and that the pilot could not control the plane. 'It came down with a bump, a bump, a bump, hit the front end down, I heard some crashing and it's come to a halt,' said Stuart Sykes. 'There were a few sparks and three or four crashes, that must have been the propeller hitting the floor. Then it uprighted again and it came to a stop.' Roads around the airport were closed while two incoming flights to the airport, from Scotland and the Netherlands, were delayed as a result of the incident. The passenger took four passes of the runway, and there were cheers from the control tower when it finally came to a halt on the ground. 'For somebody who is not a pilot but has been around airfields and been a passenger on several occasions to take control is nothing short of phenomenal," said Richard Tomlinson. "He made quite a good landing, actually,' added flight instructor Murray. 'He didn't know the layout of the airplane. He didn't have lights on so he was absolutely flying blind as well.'"
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
So he basically winged it and hoped for the best?
Yes.
The proverb among pilots is "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing".
Professional pilots obviously hold themselves to a higher standard than that, but for a first-time flyer that landing met the requirements completely.
Ya, it's nice that most of the stories don't say a word about the dead guy. He didn't actually die until after the landing, but he was unresponsive before landing.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/512649/20131009/john-wildey-humberside-plane-landing-pilot-ill.htm
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
He did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
In general, you're doing a good job if at all times you keep the plane between the two lights on the wingtips.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. Any landing you can walk away from and reuse the aircraft is a great one!
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
He must have had the fish.
(I am a student pilot, and I fly a Cessna 172)
This guy is clearly a badass, but his best trait is keeping his head on straight, knowing something about how airplanes work, and figuring out how to talk to someone. Landing is also a lot simpler if you don't care about damaging the plane (he had a prop strike) or landing on a runway that's not 4x longer than you'd usually use. Once you can talk to someone who's flown planes, you're pretty much OK as long as you don't melt down - do what they tell you, which will probably consist of a crash course in flying (what the instruments are, what's important about them, how to control the plane, etc) followed by directions to fly the plane onto the runway and hold on tight. Normally there's more finesse involved in touching down smoothly, in a short distance, at a proper approach speed - but that goes out the window in an emergency.
I don't want to sound like I'm diminishing Mr. Wildey's accomplishment - keeping cool in that situation is very hard, and avoiding being a smoking hole in the ground is even harder with no experience. This guy should take some flying lessons, if this whole thing hasn't soured him on the idea of small planes. Maybe he can even log this in his logbook (not entirely kidding!).
For anybody regularly flies with somebody in a small plane, there are classes out there that will prepare you for exactly such an emergency - a few hours of basic flying, radios, and landings. Don't assume your flight sim experience will do you any good, except for maybe knowing what the instruments are. The most important part is keeping a cool head - you're eventually going to land, and it'll turn out a lot better if you keep calm and think it through.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Actually yes, it IS difficult unless you've practiced it. And most of us who practiced it had an instructor who recovered the plane when we fucked it up. And every pilot fucked this up in training.
Flare too little / late: you smack into the runway. If you're descending too fast you're basically crashing right now. If you're nose down you could snap the front gear. Hit with all gear and you can still snap the front or wheelbarrow if you're too heavy on the front. Good chance you'll bounce too. If you're going too fast that bounce could be high and far, and you may bounce oddly if you didn't hit evenly - throwing you off to the side or what have you. Porpoising is particularly nasty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5ZzktAFJK4
Flare too soon: you balloon upwards and eat up runway fast. If you don't correct or abort you'll run out of runway fast.
Flare too much: you balloon upwards meaning you're getting high and approaching a stall. Stall and you'll slap down rather hard on the runway, potentially from enough height to kill yourself.
A good flare is a continual thing as well. It's not like you just pull back a bit and you're done... you need to keep pulling back to increase the flare as air speed and altitude decrease. Through that entire process you can go too much or too little, causing the issues above.
Oh, and keep in mind that since the plane is in a nose up attitude you can't really see ahead of you very well. You're judging your altitude over the runway largely via peripheral vision. And you height cues vary depending how wide the runway is!
Now try throwing some cross wind into that just to add to your day.
Screw it up and need to go around? There's more than just throwing in the throttle. You need to reduce your flaps, in stages, as you pull out. Slap those suckers full up and you may lose too much lift to soon and plane meets ground rather harshly.
Personally if the idea of landing a plane with zero training doesn't scare the piss out you, you probably don't have a good enough understanding of what you're about to attempt.
Actually, it is. It's the hardest part of learning to land, which is the hardest part of learning to fly. It doesn't take much to screw up the flare, and it doesn't take much of a screwed-up flare to royally screw up a landing.
Example: If you're going too fast and you flare, you'll "balloon" off the runway. Now you'll be 15 feet off and bleeding airspeed - fast. Unless you are pretty comfortable with flying, you'll stall up there and drop like a stone onto the runway.
If I were the instructor, I wouldn't even risk it. I'd tell him to come in fast (~75 knots "dirty") to keep him well away from stall speed and just fly it onto the runway. He had plenty of runway (~7200 feet, C172 needs ~2000 to be comfortable) and nobody was worried about damaging the plane so a nice graceful flare is wholly unnecessary. It sounds like this is pretty much what they did, because he had a prop strike.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The fact that the reporter didn't immediately satisfy your every burning question about what happened to other people doesn't automatically make it piss-poor reporting, either.
It would simply be up to the reporter to ask a few questions, like reporters are suppose to.
Shockingly, in many countries, it is still legal for the family of a recently-deceased private person to tell reporters to fuck off. And a few reporters still feel enough responsibility to the truth not to just print wild-ass guesses from random bystanders.
~Idarubicin
FALSE Probably the worst stereotype that exists in general aviation today.
It's expensive, yes, but it's not TOO bad - a reasonable used plane can be had for the low 5 digits, and many, many pilots do split ownership. Or they rent.
All in all, you do want to have a decent income - most pilots are middle income families - not rich 1 percenters. Most pilots also don't fly too much - under 100 hours a year. So split ownership or rental is actually very beneficial - the more an airplane flies, the cheaper it is to run (they want to run - the maintenance and everything goes way down if the engine's constantly turning and burning and such). Top end prices for a fully loaded brand new Cessna is probably around a quarter million.
And that's ignoring the biggest growth segment - light sport aircraft. They're currently expensive new, but the costs are way lower.
Now, if you want to talk jets that cost $1-2M, sure, they're for the rich and famous, but the regular avgas sucking sky-hole puncher is well within reach of someone with a decent salary. In fact, most /. readers working in IT probably make much more than the existing pilot population.
Learning to fly isn't too bad - all in all, probably $10,000 or so. It's cheaper if you can save up and do it in a month, more expensive if you have to spread it out over a couple of years. Or do light sport (you can upgrade it to full private pilot's later).
The benefits are, however, immense. If you could cut down a 10 hour road trip to 3 hours, wouldn't that be fun? And instead of endless highways and dirt, you get to see sights that few ever get to see. Avoiding big commercial airports for the little ones can often put you closer to your destination than flying commercial and dealing with security, lineups, etc. Heck, if you're particularly avid, you can fly into the neighbouring state for breakfast, fly back and have lots of time before lunch (many people do - they're called fly-ins, though the crowds are usually so fun they stay a few hours and end up having lunch as well).
As a career, though, being a pilot generally stinks - learning to fly and getting all your ratings, and you're barely making any rent. Finally get right seat at a region carrier and it's in the low 20s it's a joke. The big airlines aren't any better - most /. people are looking at people with 15-20 years seniority just to get the same salary.
However, if you don't want a career, with its lousy hours and routes until you build up seniority, flying for fun is actually quite affordable. And when the weather's beautiful, there's nothing like popping in the plane, flying to a nearby city and getting takeout for dinner after work.
And if you're a city dweller, night flying is so ... serene and even when you're just 2500' high (I was flying local area), you;re above the light pollution and can see the stars. (And by local, I meant flying to cities that would normally take 40 minutes by car take barely 10 by air - or just when you get up, it's time to descend).
Expensive? It's one of the more costlier hobbies, but you can find golfers and scuba divers who'll plunk down huge cash on their equipment and training as well. Ditto car enthusiasts. Maybe even stamp collectors. Or gun enthusiasts (yes, guns can be had for a few hundred dollars, or many thousands). The only "expensive" stereotype comes from the fact that there's no realy "cheap" option (though many have earned flights by working or volunteering at their local airports). It's I suppose like Apple products - they don't make low end cheap stuff.
Hell, there's always the Coast Guard, and many civilian organizations that can subsidize flight training too (usually for SAR, firefighting, etc). It is a very social thing though - you cannot just fly and leave, you'll need to interact with people.