How to land an airplane if you are not a pilot

Via Daily Timewaster

 

At the flight school people always ask me:

"Can I land a plane? I have X years of flight simulator experience."

Short answer is: history shows you will probably die. Probably not because it is difficult but because you don't know what you don't know. Flight simulators distort important aspects of landing airplanes:

 your awesome 200 degrees/3D vision, the muscle mechanics of flying and the notion of distance. In fact, flight simulators are harder than the real thing. Yet, many in the flight school I teach landed without the need for intervention in their first flight. I landed an airplane for the first time when I was 11 years old. With a bit of luck you can do this by yourself. So, in case of an emergency, this is what you could do...

(TL;DR at the end)

There are many types of airplanes, but when it comes to landing there is pretty much two classes:

heavy and light. This is more related to lift/weight ratio (and wing type) than actual the size of the airplane. I will show you how you can land light airplanes in the easiest way possible, as long as first you open any flight simulator right now (xplane for iphone is ok) and understand the basic controls (pitch, roll, yaw) and the relationship between speed and angle of attack. Playing with it for 10 minutes (at low speeds) should suffice. The basic mechanics are good enough. Keep in mind that brains are incredible machines and can learn things automagically, but you need to stay calm. For instance, my wife learned to keep an airplane flying without one single instruction.

The pilot died, now what?

More @ Eduardo Intermeta