The Right Hands on the Controls

I've tried A, I've tried B. Tell me what else I can try! The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe (1979)


Trigger warning - if you are a white knuckle flier, this blog is not for you.

Not everyone has the temperament or training to respond correctly in an emergency situation. Certainly history books are full of hair-raising moments that ended with "Well, shit" followed by a very loud noise.

Two situations I learned of this week described the better of outcomes, the steely-eyed pilot seizing victory from the jaws of bent aluminum. The captains of the respective planes could not have been more different, or more alike.



Seventeen year-old Maggie Taraska departed the Beverly Regional Airport on a training flight. She was alone in the airplane, a student pilot. The airplane took off normally... Okay, it took off but left the right main landing gear behind. At the airport. On the runway. One can hear in her voice (video attached) that she is initially rattled. Well, who wouldn't be?

Aviate, navigate, communicate. Pilots are trained to fly the airplane, come what may. Sounds simple, until... Well, the landing gear falls off and you are alone at the controls of a sick plane. With a little help from her friends she gets the plane down, walks away and says later "You've got to have confidence in yourself to be a pilot."

On the other side of the world, in 2008, a Qantas A-330 airliner with 315 people aboard experiences an "uncommanded maneuver." In non-pilot English (being a non-pilot myself I usually need translation software) that means the airplane did something the pilots did not ask it to do. A nearly negative one G dive ensued, injuring 119 people, eleven of them seriously. The pilots regained control, only to have the airplane repeat the maneuver.

The captain later reported "There wasn't anything in our flight manuals that told us what to do." So, he and his crew improvised solutions, ignored the bleating and screaming of their fault detection software and flew the airplane. Unsure if the bizarre behavior of their aircraft would repeat itself too close to the ground to recover, the captain ordered an unusual maneuver he'd learned as a fighter pilot.

"Well," the Captain observed dryly to his cockpit crew mates as they wrestled with the beast. "I picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue."



Google the line if you don't recognize it.

Two cool customers. Two safe landings.