Untrained Passenger Lands Airplane ‘I’ve got a serious situation here,’ noted the rookie pilot. James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/untrained-passenger-lands-airplane-11652285057?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
Whenever disaster strikes and life’s great challenges arise, we all hope to be ready to rise to the occasion. But it seems unreasonable even to hope for the achievement of a rookie aviator on Tuesday.
WPBF, an ABC television affiliate in Florida, is covering perhaps the most inspiring story of the year. The station’s Ari Hait reports from West Palm Beach:
A passenger with no flight experience safely landed a private plane at Palm Beach International Airport Tuesday afternoon after the pilot suffered a medical emergency.
“I’ve got a serious situation here,” the passenger can be heard telling Air Traffic Control in Fort Pierce. “My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”
“Roger. What’s your position?” Air Traffic Control responded.
“I have no idea,” the passenger said. “I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”
“Maintain wings level and just try to follow the coast, either north or southbound,” Air Traffic Control told him. “We’re trying to locate you.”
Minutes that must have seemed endless went by until controllers located the plane off the coast of Boca Raton.
WPBF’s Tara Jakeway picks up the story with a man named Robert Morgan at Palm Beach International, who was originally not scheduled to work on Tuesday but happened to be covering a shift for a colleague:
It was around noon on Tuesday when Robert, an air traffic controller at PBIA, was outside the tower reading a book on a break when his co-worker yelled, “There’s a passenger flying a plane that’s not a pilot and the pilot is incapacitated so they said you need to help them try and land the plane.”
He was the man for the job. In addition to his 20 years in tower control, he is also a flight instructor with around 1,200 hours under his belt.
It’s too bad neither Robert Stack nor George Kennedy is around any more to play the part of Mr. Morgan when this story is made into a film. The real-life event was certainly dramatic enough, not that you’d know it from Mr. Morgan’s spare recitation of events. Ms. Jakeway reports:
“I knew the plane was flying like any other plane, I just knew I had to keep him calm, point him to the runway and tell him how to reduce the power so he could descend to land,” Morgan said.
He had never flown the specific model, a Cessna Grand Caravan, so he used a picture of the cockpit to understand the specifics the novice was working with…
“Before I knew it, he said, ‘I’m on the ground, how do I turn this thing off?’”
The identity of the passenger-turned-pilot has not been released, though Mr. Morgan was able to meet him on the tarmac and joyfully embraced the mystery man, who perhaps will be played by Tom Holland on screen. Ms. Jakeway adds:
“It felt really good to help somebody and he told me that he couldn’t wait to get home and hug his pregnant wife,” Morgan said.
WPBF’s Mr. Hait explains the ensuing radio chatter among aviation professionals:
“You just witnessed a couple of passengers land that plane,” Air Traffic Control said over the radio.
Another voice responded.
“Did you say the passengers landed the plane?” he asked.
“That’s correct.”
“Oh, my gosh. Great job.”
WPBF’s Terri Parker has more from one of the professional aviators who is calling Tuesday’s events “nothing short of a miracle”:
Jet Blue pilot Justin Dalmolin said he had to hold off on landing while flight controllers guided the passenger-flown plane…
Dalmolin said the single-engine turbine plane is fairly sophisticated and he can’t believe flight controllers were able to talk the passenger through not only recovering from the plane’s dive, but stabilizing it and then landing it safely at PBIA.
“The level of difficulty that this person had to deal with in terms of having zero flight time to fly and land a single-engine turbine aircraft is absolutely incredible,” said Dalmolin…
“I remember my first days when I first started flight training I was white-knuckled and sweating for my first ten hours of flight training,” he added.
Most of us are no doubt imagining much worse than white knuckles if called upon to land an airplane. But if that day ever comes, it’s nice to know there is still cause for hope.
Surely there must be something you can do.
***
James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
***
Follow James Freeman on Twitter.
Comments are closed.
