It’s one of those things you’ve maybe given some thought to at one point or another in your life…do you think you’d be able to be talked through landing a plane if there was some kind of emergency that prevented the pilot from doing it?

Or can ANY regular person be guided through such a monumental task?

On commercial flights, there are a lot of safeguards in place to make sure that the plane will be okay in case a pilot passes away in the air (which has happened before). Co-pilots are always onboard and on long flights, there are sometimes even relief crews.

But still, could someone with no experience land a commercial plane if they had to?

A pilot named Patrick Smith says,

“A non-pilot wouldn’t have the slightest idea even how to work the communications radios, let alone fly and land the jet.

There is a zero-percent chance of a successful outcome in this scenario.”

Ouch.

And, despite the incredible technology in today’s planes, Smith says,

“People’s presumptions about how modern planes are flown, and what airline pilots actually do, has long frustrated me.

People have a vastly—vastly!—exaggerated idea of what cockpit automation actually does, and how pilots interact with that automation, and assume this would be a lot easier than it actually would be.”

So I guess it’s not as easy as it looks, people…

By the way, it’s not as impossible as these folks are saying. A passenger with absolutely no flying experience landed a single-engine Cessna plane in Florida recently after the pilot became incapacitated, so this kind of situation COULD happen…

So you never know…