stall84
But I'm proud of the people that worked on and executed that mission for them. Obviously a moment of immense national pride, well deserved.
You drill for emergency situations during training, and you should drill repeatedly afterwards. Any ATP rated pilots do so regularly whether in actual flight or in simulators.
But one flight very early, before I had my pilot's license, flying on a student's permit.. I ran out of fuel during cruise flight.. It was dumb, it was a case of me being a poor just-out-of-college student, and trying to do some very risky calculus with the flight planning and fuel required. There were extenuating factors including the (small) plane's fuel gauges malfunctioning sporadically .. having to 'stick the tank' on the ground (measure the fuel in the plane's wings by using a ruler and chart for how many inches equaled gallons).
.. excuses aside. I ran out of gas at 8000 feet above Columbus Georgia ..
What I remember happening is the engine abruptly lurching, then stopping, sending a massive amount of adrenaline through me.
But almost immediately I started looking for a runway to land at. I knew I had at least 1, maybe 2 airports in range of a glide, and one was relatively in front of me, so I decided on it, and called ATC in Atlanta who were following my flight at that time & declared a 'pan-pan' (step below a mayday .. meaning you have a serious situation on board & require priority attention if available, but you are still in control of the aircraft). They confirmed the vector to the (abandoned, but still in decent condition) airport a few miles in front of me.
Now.. Your original question is probably answered at this point... Basically as long as you can continue to have things to do .. As long as you can envision and work toward a goal (landing the f'n plane safely) .. The stress of the situation tends to just fuel the focus on getting to that goal.
I can't say its going to be the same for every pilot, and maybe it isn't . I did grow up obsessed with flying (after being absolutely horrified by it as a child), and so I had kind of gone over in my mind and in training over and over again this potential type of situation occurring and I wasn't about to let the moment get to big.
This kind of thing does worry me a little bit with our recent explosive need for pilots as commercial aviation expands rapidly. A lot of pilots are going through "0 to ATP" courses to get a good paying job, rather than because they're actually obsessed with flying itself.. Because in those cases, I'm not sure what is going to happen psychologically for those pilots. Again though, this is why you are constantly drilled and trained on these situations, so that you have almost muscle-memory of things to be doing in an emergency situation so that there is no time for you to sit passively and become a victim of circumstance.
But I can disseminate at least two flying maxims you can take away from this tragedy:
1: Do what TCAS is telling you to do.
2: Air Traffic Control does NOT have the final responsibility for your plane, you do.
- The TCAS system had already resolved the safe and correct conflict avoidance maneuvers for both of the transceivers involved (on both aircraft).
- As amazing and professional as our air traffic controllers are (and they are), they to, just like you the pilot are prone to error, and they in fact are not inside your aircraft, nor are they the pilot in command.
I've seen especially in new pilots and people that want to learn to fly this urge to defer to ATC (I even asked a friend who's a huge Flight Simulator enthusiast, of which I was too when young, what he'd do in a purely technical flight situation, and he responded he'd "ask ATC what to do"...).
While yes, Air Traffic Control 'controls' certain air space, they don't control your aircraft or its occupants. FAR 91.3 says it all, I'll let you look it up, it's 2 very brief (thank you FAA/congress) sentences that spell out the end of this discussion. You might get a fine, you might lose your license, etc etc, if you're reasoning for having to deviate from ATC rules aren't sufficient..
But hey in this case would those pilots on those 2 planes in this incident have rather lost their licenses (potentially) or have what happened happen.
Of course this incident is nuanced, as they all are. Flying safely involves mitigating and accepting certain levels of risk. TCAS was a system specifically designed and implemented to resolve collision situations. You test your equipment at regular intervals and pre-flight so that you can be confident they are working properly so that when you get into a situation where TCAS is telling you to do something, you do it.
But the reality is stress, human behavior isms' like maybe say flying in from an eastern european country and wanting to not 'piss off' the Swiss controllers, so deferring to their every direction instead of following your own instruments. << That's a real thing .. when you fly into busy airspace in the US, you quickly realize you just 'don't want to piss anyone off' .. All of these factors influence what should have been a cut and dry collision avoidance dictated by the TCAS system. And this is the cost of human flight.
I guess that's about .. literally.. average.
As a CFI, and lifelong aviation nutcase.. one who has been described by a few of my instructors in the past as 'morbidly' researching aviation accidents kind of obsessively (other instructors of mine realize on the contrary its a very wise past-time), this is a particular MASSIVE peeve of mine.
Just a few months ago here in Atlanta a small single engine plane made an emergency landing on I-985 (actually on an exit ramp leading off of it), around 5PM .. Anyone around here knows that interstate and exit ramp would be packed around that time of day. But somehow, thankfully, no cars were wrecked and the plane/pilot survived with just a collapsed main gear. Well.. directly adjacent, and in the exact same direction of travel of the exit ramp was a wide opened, plowed, clay field that was being prepped for a building construction.
I don't know if flight simulator (how i started as a kid actually) or something else is to blame, but so many new pilots get this idea in their head of emergency landing on roads/highways .. and that is such a horrible idea with reasons that should be obvious to anyone.. regardless of being a pilot or not.
Imagine for a second your wife/gf or partner were picking up the kids or whatever and driving home on that exit ramp that day.. All of a sudden a plane comes out of nowhere and of course frightens the heck out of them.. they regain focus on the road to see the car in front has slammed on brakes for the same reason.. before they know it.. a high-speed impact has happened, with injuries or worse to the occupants (all the while the emergency landing plane glides effortlessly to a stop on the exit ramp.. leaving a wake of destruction.)
That example is just showing what can happen to everyone else, the story this is attached to is a perfect example of what can actually happen to the plane and occupants itself.
Power lines, tree limbs, cars, power poles, .. all exist around roads. If you are making an emergency landing.. look for a field first, only if everything on the ground is covered by trees and no grass/dirt/field exists to land on should you resort to landing on a road.
In the case of an airliner its the same story, even though yes they are heavier.. and there will be more landing gear "dig" into the turf/soil/grass than in a small plane.. but the fundamental reasons why you want to avoid roads are the same.. you'll just have to compensate with your angle and velocity at landing.. oh btw.. soft grass/turf do also help with absorbing some of the E from the landing.