Passenger lands plane after pilot emergency

JUST after noon on Tuesday, a passenger flying in a single-engine plane about 32km east of Boca Raton, Florida in the US, radioed air-traffic control.

“I’ve got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent,” the man said, adding that from about 9 000 feet up he had “no idea how to fly the airplane”.

The passenger told the control tower that he was not sure where he was, only that he could “see the coast of Florida in front of me”.

From a tower in Fort Pierce, about 120km north of Boca Raton, the air traffic controller asked the passenger to reiterate his situation.

The passenger repeated that the pilot was incoherent: “He is out.”

For about the next five minutes, the air traffic controller instructed the passenger on how to keep the plane stable and to begin the descent.

“Try to hold the wings level and see if you can start descending for me,” the controller said. “Push forward on the controls and descend at a very slow rate.”

At points, the passenger remarked on how little he knew about the airplane he was flying: “I can’t even get my (navigation) screen to turn on. It has all the information on it.”

His voice remained relatively calm, even as he said things such as: “I have no idea how to stop the airplane. I don’t know how to do anything.”

The tower connected the passenger to air traffic controllers in Palm Beach County.

They guided him to the Palm Beach International Airport, where the man successfully landed the plane.

A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson said that the plane was registered to an address in Connecticut. The spokesperson said the plane landed in Palm Beach County around noon on Tuesday following a “possible pilot medical issue”.

The FAA did not identify the pilot or the passenger. The plane had taken off just before 11am from Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas, according to the flight tracker FlightAware.

JetBlue pilot Justin Dalmolin said that he had to wait to land his plane as air traffic controllers guided the Cessna’s passenger into the airport.

What the passenger did was no easy feat, Dalmolin said.

“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,” he said.

“I remember my first days when I first started flight training I was white-knuckled and sweating.”