Thats what you need a cool head when everyone else is losing theirs. Not only that if the pilot had any sense he would give any passenger in the front a TLDR for emergencies just as a common courtesy. TBH I'm surprised the various Aviation Authorities have not mandated some sort of TLDR emergency/safety guide for small planes and their passengers, unless of course they dont really care if one drops out of the sky killing everyone!?!
Not a pilot, but taken control of a biplane, & helicopter, biplane is so easy, doing the nose dives like you see in the old war movies, bringing them up to stalling point etc, the plane even makes the same noise as you here in the movies, but its bloody cold even with your sheepskin coat on.
Helicopters, now they are sensitive and the pilot wouldnt let me do the pedals, but it was a hover test, ie seeing how long I could keep it hovering.
Have flown with ex red arrows doing the same stunts as a passenger, I think they tried their best to get me to use their sick back but they didnt succeed, haven't done any fighter jets yet, or any Air Racing but never say never!
I would imagine the acceleration from a flight deck catapult must be on a par with a Porsche 911 Turbo S on launch control, maybe a bit better who knows?
This is with the exception of auto return to base autopilots and parachute systems like Cirrus's. Those are safe to be operated by passengers. But we didn't have either of those, most of the planes didn't even have an autopilot.
The plane in the article was a Cessna 208 though and probably had one.
Having an untrained passenger is no worse than flying solo. The latter is clearly allowed, and should probably stay allowed?
It would be an opportunistic thing that only applies when it's near zero cost.
It would look more like this unless it has the glass cockpit of course:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Cessna_2...
In the real world, when you sit up straight, you see just fine out of a tricycle gear airplane and see the runway ahead on the ground and the ground below you in the air. And then you slouch a couple inches and look down and have a great view of the bottom instruments.
It's not like being in the cabin in a commercial airliner, you'd see the pilot doing these things, and honestly as far as plane interfaces go, the Cessna is not bad.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Here's the instrument panel. While I wouldn't say every untrained person can just "figure it out", I think there are a decent number who would at least be able to get an altitude, heading, and vertical speed reading out of that. Especially if you'd spent some time in the last 30 minutes looking at them while your pilot friend is focused on flying.
I've spent a signficant amount of time flying cessnas in MS flight sim and XPlane, but I wouldn't assume that would automatically carry over if I ended up in a situation like that, and I certainly would err on the side of caution and risk ATC thinking I had less knowledge than risk overstating it and risk something going wrong because they end up thinking I'd be confident performing an ILS approach or something.