Ask the pilot

Can someone with no flight training safely land an airliner? Plus: Pilotless planes, overpaid pilots and other aviation myths.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airlines, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

Dec. 21, 2007 | Truth be told, I've never had cable TV, but the Discovery Channel's "MythBusters" series has always struck me as a fun and useful idea for a program. A sort of Snopes.com of the airwaves, it seeks to prove or dispel various urban legends and generally wacky propositions -- for example, can a person really become stuck to an airplane toilet seat by flushing it during flight?

With commercial aviation as rich as it is with mysteries and misconceptions, it's perhaps no surprise that plane-related topics are among the show's most frequent. Most recently, hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman attempted to find out if people with no flight training, namely themselves, could safely land an airliner. Their answer turned out to be yes, probably.

The correct answer, of course, is no, absolutely not. But who am I to quibble?

"MythBusters" sets things up in a NASA simulator stripped down to represent a "generic commercial airliner," which is to say, a rather unrealistic one. A seasoned pilot, stationed in an imaginary control tower, carefully instructs the hosts via radio. On the first try, they crash. The second time, they make it.

But all they do, essentially, is land a make-believe airplane in a contrived, tightly controlled experiment. It was not, I'm sorry to say, realistic.

Now, to be fair, the question of whether a nonpilot could land an actual jetliner depends somewhat on the meaning of "land." Are we talking from just a few hundred feet over the ground, in ideal weather, with the plane stabilized and pointed toward the runway? Or are we talking about the whole, full-blown arrival, from cruising altitude to touchdown, requiring all sorts of maneuvering, programming and configuring?

You've got a fighting chance with the former, provided there's a certified pilot sitting next to you, telling you exactly what to do, how to do it and when. The touchdown will be rough at best, but with a little luck you won't become a cartwheeling fireball. Last summer, a friend of mine, a private pilot with about 300 Cessna hours in his logbook, had the opportunity to attempt a landing in a full-motion Boeing 767 simulator. I sat in the captain's seat and kept my mouth shut while an instructor, stationed behind us, talked him through the approach. He more or less crashed, freezing the simulator after a hard bounce and slamming the plane's tail against the runway.

But the scenario most people envision is the one where, droning along at cruise altitude, the crew suddenly becomes incapacitated, and only the heroics of a brave passenger, who has perhaps a little desktop simulator experience under his belt, can save the day. He'll strap himself in, and with the smooth coaching of an unseen voice over the radio, try to bring down the plane.

The chance of success: approximately zero percent. I reckon our hero would be highly fortunate just to locate a microphone switch and figure out how to communicate. Keeping the plane upright would in some ways be the easiest part. It's the small stuff that presents the greatest challenge: working the radios, dialing in changes to the FMS (flight management system) and autoflight panels, changing speeds and altitudes. Dictating such tasks from afar would difficult enough. For the hapless passenger pressed into duty, getting them right would be even more challenging.

Never mind a layperson. What about a pilot? How would a pilot qualified on, say, a Boeing 737 fare at the controls of an Airbus A340 -- a make and model he or she had never operated before? I reckon things would turn out fine, but it wouldn't necessarily be easy. Airplane types are very different, which is one reason it takes several weeks of training when transitioning from one model to another.

Most disappointing, "MythBusters" tells us that the hosts could have made it much easier on themselves had they simply taken advantage of their plane's automation. Once again we're fed the oft-repeated baloney about how landing a modern aircraft requires not much more than punching a few buttons and sitting back.

Man, had I known it was that easy, all those months I spent in training would have been a lot less stressful. Ironic how a television program whose purpose is to cut through the crap and set the record straight not only manages to get it wrong but in the process perpetuates the widespread misunderstanding of what cockpit automation really is and how it works.

This gets back to our discussion on the prospect of pilotless planes. To repeat what I said last August: An automated flight deck makes a pilot's job easier the way high-tech medical equipment helps a surgeon. It's all very advanced and expensive and ultimately engineered to keep your customers safe and alive. But to understand how this equipment works, and to have any idea how to operate it properly, ... well, you still need to be a doctor, or a pilot, first.

Yes, as "MythBusters" reminds us, jetliners can and occasionally do perform automatic landings, as they've been doing for 30-plus years. Impressive but entirely misleading, for setting up and managing these procedures is a heck of a lot more complicated than tapping a button and watching the plane steer itself to touchdown. To begin with, our theoretical nonpilot would have to be coached from 35,000 feet all the way to the point where an automatic approach could commence, complete with any number of twists, turns, descents, decelerations and configuration changes. I reckon that would be about as easy as dictating brain surgery over the telephone to somebody who has never held a scalpel.

Here's a modern cockpit. What do you think? See that rectangular panel in the center directly under the windshield stanchion, with about 50 switches and dials and readouts? That's your mode control panel -- your autopilot. Those automatic landings are controlled from there. Effectively, the autopilot is not so much a single thing as it is a system -- a collection of guidance components. There are controls for altitude and heading, others for speed and power, still others for navigation. All of this works together with the flight management system, manipulated through that pair of boxes with the big keyboards, seen near the bottom of the photo. Nowhere is there a button marked "Land now at closest airport."

Luckily there has never been a case where a passenger needed to be drafted for cockpit duty. I guess that means either it never will happen or it is destined to happen soon, depending on how cynical you are about statistics. A few years ago, here in New England, after the lone pilot of a Cape Air commuter plane became ill, a passenger took over and performed a safe landing. The papers and TV news had a field day with that one. As it happened, the passenger was a licensed private pilot, and the aircraft was a 10-seat, piston-powered Cessna 402.

A few of you might remember the film "Airport 1975." A 747 is struck near the flight deck in midair by a small propeller plane, and all three pilots are taken out. I almost hate to say it, but dangling Charlton Heston from a helicopter and dropping him through the hole in the fuselage wasn't as far-fetched a solution as it might sound. It was about the only way that jumbo jet was getting onto the ground in fewer than a billion pieces. The scene in which Karen Black, playing a flight attendant, coaxes the crippled jumbo over a mountain range was, if less than technically accurate, useful in demonstrating the difficulty any civilian would have in pulling off even the simplest maneuver. (The "Airport" series went into a dreadful tailspin after that one, following up with the preposterous 1977 installment, but '75 was, as far as cheesy disaster flicks go, pretty well done.)

Next page: How might things have turned out aboard United flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, had the passengers breached the cockpit?