did they address that big whopper about baggage covered with unprovenanced doghair told by a certain pilot/internet columnist a few months ago?

Just so fair is fair.

The first attempt by both hosts on Myth Busters was WITHOUT help; they both crashed and burned. The second time was WITH help; they both landed in ideal conditions.

Of course should a layperson be required to land a large plane, conditions are probably not ideal.

lots of people probably think flying is like driving as that is the closest vehicular analogy that people can think of.

How many people could marginally drive a semi-truck or even a manual transmission car on the first try? Probably 0.

Then how can anyone "fly" a plane on the first try? Probably 0 again.

And another bad thing about saying a pilot earns $xxx per hour. People will then assume....wow $190 per hour for $40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, pilots are rich. People mix flight time with true "work time".

Happy holidays all.

Within the limits of their standards, at least. In order to prove a myth "busted", they have to prove that it is completely implausible. It is true that people can sometimes land airplanes with no training. I wouldn't want to be on the plane, given that 1) the conditions have to be perfect and 2) they are still likely to screw up and kill everybody on board, but ... it is possible, therefore within the Mythbuster's universe the myth is true.

You'd like the show. They did a great episode on what would happen if someone fired a gun in a plane (it wouldn't decompress, in spite of rumors to the contrary). This is another exercise I wouldn't want to see tried in real life.

As a flight instructer, Smith was certanly know that the ability to follow directions and learn how to fly varies wildly from person to person. One person may be well co-ordinated, able to follow detailed directions effortless and qualify for their license in the minum number of hours required while another person may struggle so hard that even after three times the average number of instuctional hours they are still not fit to even do their first solo. I think it is reasonable to assume that the ability to successful be talked through the landing of a plane will vary wildly from person to person.

Not to dispute your thesis about the near impossibilty of an amateur landing a jetliner, however, you may be wrong about FLight 93. Aboard the flight was the first cousin of one of my best friends. His name was Donald Green and he was Executive vice president and chief financial officer of Safe Flight Instrument Corporation. He was jet qualified in business jets. We theorize that he may well have Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, and others, that if they could get control of the cockpit, he could land the plane.

This sounds like a friendly wager waiting to happen. How much would it cost to get an hour of simulator time and instruction from a 737 pilot? I want to try!

Patrick, you got a little riled up this week. Take a pill on occasion, but keep writing.

As one who has worked on and "flown" commercial and military flight simulators, I can tell you that I usually succeeded in crashing upon landings and when trying to land on carriers, the most common result was being smooshed against the back end of the ship. It's not easy at all.

So I guess now you are going to tell me that even if I did land that 747, some young luscious flight attendant is not going to thank me in many exciting ways. Thanks a lot guy!

I would like to point out that most adults who have never ridden a bike before, will wreck their first time trying. Most adults how have never swam before, will sink their first time trying. Even with pros trying to talk them through it they will not have much success. How do people think they can suddenly land a huge airliner the first time?

The difficulty of the landing and the likelihood that someone who's not a pilot could do it would seem to depend a lot on the specific situation.

The odds go up in daytime, with clear weather, with favorable winds, with a relatively small plane and a relatively long runway. They go down, probably pretty drastically, if any of those circumstances are missing. (So forget the nighttime landing for a 747 at Washington National when it's sleeting.)

Also, if I were putting together a scenario for a layperson landing, I would not assume much in the way of pre-landing maneuvers. This is something that's actually in the control of the people on the ground - they can clear a path by having the nearby professionally-piloted planes get out of the way, and they can get the amateur lined up with the runway a long way away. It's certainly true that having to do a lot of vectoring will make it harder to land the plane, but that can be avoided, and I think you have to assume that it would be. Heck, I'm sure there already are procedures for "straight" approaches to nearly every airport for planes that have damage that makes turning difficult.

Oh, and one other quibble - I think the odds actually are better if the non-pilot gets the controls pretty far away from the airport than if it happens nearby. You want time to teach that person a few things at 30,000 feet, rather than at 1,000.

Still, no matter what the scenario, the odds that a regular person would be able to land a commercial jet or, heck, a prop plane, would seem to be pretty low.

of the scenario: who's doing the talking? By which I mean, there are lots of people experienced in talking brand new pilots through a landing while sharing the cockpit - they are called instructors. (And it's not for nothing that the instructor has a set of controls!) But how many instructors have tried to talk someone through a landing from the ground? Seems to me that it would be pretty darn hard to judge what needs to be done next, and whether the would-be hero is giving accurate feedback on airspeed and altitude. Who practices that? How likely is it that they would turn out to be as talented at talking someone through a landing as the heretofore untutored pilot would need to be at operating complex and unfamiliar machinery?