Introduction
Since 1974, passengers have landed planes at least 19 times after the pilot collapsed, passed out or, in one case, jumped out. Most were in Cessnas and Pipers. Some of the passengers had never touched the controls. Others were student pilots, or licensed pilots in a bigger, faster plane than anything they had flown. The cases come from Wikipedia's talk-down landing list, accident reports and news coverage from the time.
No untrained passenger has landed an airliner. The closest anyone came was Helios Flight 522 in 2005, when a flight attendant with a commercial pilot license but no training on the Boeing 737 reached the cockpit after both pilots passed out. Everyone aboard died.
The survivable landings
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Martha Waite
An aviation-medical study of 13 US private-plane pilots who died of heart disease in flight during 1974–75 records that one pilot's wife, a non-pilot, landed the aircraft. She was Martha Waite. After William Waite, 52, suffered a fatal heart seizure in their Piper Cherokee, controllers and a pilot flying alongside talked her into a crash-landing at McGuire Air Force Base (New York Times). The landing damaged the wheels and propeller; nobody else was hurt. -
Unnamed passenger
A passenger who had reportedly flown a plane only once brought a single-engine airplane down safely at Capital City Airport in Lansing after the pilot suffered a fatal heart attack mid-flight (Wall Street Journal). -
Leland Capps
Leland Capps, 52, had limited flying experience but was not a pilot when Raymond Ihrke suffered a fatal heart attack in a Cessna U206E floatplane. Capps called the airport control tower, where a controller who was also a flight instructor talked him down. His first try at landing failed. On the second, he came down hard beside the paved runway; the floats collapsed and the aircraft was badly damaged (US accident summary; contemporary report). Capps was treated for minor injuries and released. -
Unnamed passenger
An 81-year-old non-pilot took over a Cessna 172R after its pilot suffered a fatal heart attack near Greenfield, Indiana. A professional pilot in another airplane coached him into Mount Comfort Airport. The Cessna bounced, and the passenger's attempt to recover collapsed the front landing wheel. He was not injured (US accident summary; contemporary report). -
Unnamed licensed pilot
A pilot with 600 hours of experience who was licensed only for one-engine planes took over a two-engine Piper Apache after its owner-pilot collapsed while practicing a landing near Mineral Wells. An airline pilot coached the passenger by radio. He landed without damage or injury; emergency personnel met the airplane, but the original pilot died (US accident report; case summary). -
Henry Anhalt
Pilot Kristopher Pearce, 36, collapsed at the controls of a Piper Cherokee Six / Saratoga and later died of an apparent heart attack. Passenger Henry Anhalt, 33, who had never flown an aircraft, took over with his wife and three sons aboard. He made an emergency call. Flight instructor Dan McCullough, who was giving a flying lesson nearby, talked him down as fuel ran low (AOPA Pilot briefing; Ledger coverage). Anhalt bounced, ran off the runway and caused minor damage; nobody was hurt. -
Melanie Oswalt
Melanie Oswalt, a Cape Air employee and student pilot with roughly 48 hours of training, took the controls of a two-engine Cessna 402 after pilot Ronald Crews became incoherent because insulin had driven his blood sugar dangerously low. The flight was headed from Martha's Vineyard toward Hyannis (AVweb report; Cape Cod Times). Other passengers restrained Crews. With the intended airport behind them and Provincetown closed and unmanned, she crash-landed beside the runway without lowering the wheels. Everyone aboard survived. -
Unnamed passenger
The pilot of a fast, two-engine Gulfstream 695A propeller plane collapsed and died while flying from North Las Vegas to San Diego. The passenger beside him, who had no piloting experience, took control while the other passenger worked the radio. On the fourth landing attempt, the plane lost lift at low altitude and hit the ground flat on its belly a few hundred feet short of the runway (US accident report; safety review). One passenger was seriously injured and the other received minor injuries, but both survived. -
Doug White
Doug White, a 56-year-old Louisiana pharmacist flying home from his brother's funeral with his wife and two daughters, watched charter pilot Joe Cabuk die shortly after takeoff in a Beechcraft King Air 200. White had a private pilot license and about 230 hours of experience, all in small Cessna 172s. He had never flown the larger, faster two-engine King Air or sat in the copilot's seat (AOPA interview; NBC News report). His questions ran through a relay: Fort Myers controllers Brian Norton and Dan Favio phoned Connecticut King Air instructor Kari Sorenson on his personal cell phone. Sorenson's core advice was to handle the plane as if it had one engine. White made what he called a "greaser," pilot slang for a very smooth landing. Sorenson later said he did not think you could have made the plane more complex or the pilot less experienced and still have succeeded. The 2023 film On a Wing and a Prayer, with Dennis Quaid as White, is based on the flight (Doug White). -
Unnamed woman
A woman landed the plane after her husband, the pilot, had trouble breathing. Another pilot in the air talked her down (talk-down landing list). -
Helen Collins
Helen Collins, 80, took over a two-engine Cessna 414 after her husband John, 81, lost consciousness during a fatal heart attack. She had some flight training decades earlier but hadn't piloted in years and had never flown a two-engine plane (ABC News report; CS Monitor wire). Her son and an instructor coached her by radio while another pilot flew beside her. She circled for about 90 minutes practicing landing attempts as one engine ran out of fuel and the other sputtered, then put the plane down hard. The front landing wheel collapsed and the plane skidded about 1,000 feet. Collins survived with a crushed vertebra and a cracked rib. -
John Wildey
John Wildey, 77, a former member of Britain's Royal Air Force who had never been a pilot, took control of a Cessna 172 after the pilot collapsed and later died. Wildey flew for over an hour in darkness, at first unable to work the controls or the lighting, while instructor Roy Murray and colleagues talked him through repeated landing attempts (BBC News report; Guardian interview). He landed on the fourth attempt, a controlled crash rough enough to throw sparks, with a punctured tire the main damage. It was later the subject of the television documentary Mayday: The Passenger Who Landed a Plane. -
Néstor Sargioto
Néstor Sargioto, 33, a trainee with basic flying knowledge but none in the larger aircraft involved, took the controls after pilot Rodolfo Ostermeyer suffered convulsions and lost consciousness near the Alta Gracia flying club (El Doce report). He contacted emergency services and circled the town while receiving instructions. He didn't know how to lower the landing wheels, so he landed without them. All four occupants survived, and the pilot regained consciousness after landing. -
Max Sylvester
Max Sylvester, 29, was early in his flight training and on his first lesson in that Cessna 152 when instructor Robert Mollard blacked out and slumped onto his shoulder. Sylvester had never landed an aircraft. Controllers coached him through practice landing runs, and after nearly an hour alone at the controls he landed cleanly (ABC News Australia; New York Post). The instructor survived; he was later diagnosed with a brain tumour. -
Darren Harrison
Pilot Ken Allen suffered an aortic dissection, a tear in the body's main artery, on a flight from the Bahamas. He collapsed and knocked off the automatic flight control, or autopilot, in his Cessna 208 Caravan. The plane dove about 3,500 feet and hit 295 knots (about 340 mph), well past its 190-knot limit (about 219 mph), before passenger Darren Harrison, a 39-year-old with zero flight time, climbed forward, pulled it level and found a working radio (Sunday Long Read; NBC News report). Controllers first had to locate the aircraft because Harrison couldn't say where he was. Robert Morgan, a controller who was also a flight instructor, was called off his break and guided Harrison through slowing down, lining up with the runway, touching down and braking (BBC News report). Allen survived after emergency surgery. Somewhere between 20% and 50% of people with an aortic dissection die before reaching a hospital (PMC review). -
Unnamed passenger
The 79-year-old pilot of a Piper PA-46 Meridian suffered a medical emergency after abandoning one landing attempt and climbing to try again at Martha's Vineyard Airport. His passenger, who was not a pilot, took the controls and made an emergency landing off the runway without lowering the wheels; the left wing broke (US accident report; AP News report). The pilot died; the passenger had minor injuries. -
Unnamed passenger
Joseph Izatt, 61, chair of Duke University's biomedical engineering department, suffered a medical emergency while flying his Cirrus SR-20. His lone passenger radioed that the pilot was slumped over the controls, took over and landed safely at Raleigh-Durham International Airport (NBC News report; ABC11 coverage). Izatt died at the hospital. -
Yvonne Kinane-Wells
Yvonne Kinane-Wells took over a two-engine Beechcraft King Air C90B after her husband, Eliot Alper, collapsed on a flight from Henderson, Nevada, toward Monterey. She had ridden along often but reportedly had no piloting experience. With help from an air traffic controller, she changed course to Meadows Field and landed (AP News report; Los Angeles Times). Alper later died. -
Rosario
A 22-year-old flight student identified as Rosario was flying with instructor Leandro Andrés Bertazzo, 42, when he reportedly told her, "You know what you have to do, carry on," removed his headset and seatbelt, opened the door and jumped from the Cessna 150. Despite being in "complete shock," Rosario landed without damaging the plane (CNN report). Bertazzo was found dead. Argentina's public prosecutor opened an investigation into the circumstances of his death.
The fatal takeover attempts
Failed attempts are much harder to find. A passenger who survives can tell investigators what they did. When everyone dies, investigators often can't tell whether a passenger noticed the pilot was in trouble, took the controls on purpose or knocked them while trying to help. So the list above leans toward the attempts that worked.
Two attempts are documented well enough to include here. Both killed someone aboard.
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Andreas Prodromou
A loss of cabin pressure left both pilots and nearly everyone aboard the Boeing 737 without enough oxygen to function. Flight attendant Andreas Prodromou, who held a UK commercial pilot license but had no training or certification on the 737, reached the cockpit using a portable oxygen bottle (Helios Flight 522; FAA lessons learned). Greek fighter pilots flying beside the jet saw him trying to control it after the first engine stopped when its fuel ran out; flight data confirmed their account. His emergency calls never transmitted because the radio was set to the wrong channel. The second engine quit before impact. All 121 aboard died. Prodromou may also have been short of oxygen himself. -
Andrew Sikes
A Vanderbilt LifeFlight medical helicopter, an Airbus EC130, crashed after the pilot suffered a medical emergency mid-flight. Flight paramedic Andrew Sikes, who had no flight training, saw the pilot go blank, reached over the pilot's hands to grab the control stick and tried to slow and land the helicopter by imitating what he'd seen pilots do (US preliminary report; NewsChannel 5). The helicopter struck treetops. Flight nurse Allan Williams, 55, was killed; the pilot and Sikes were seriously injured. Investigators have reported no mechanical malfunction so far. Unlike an airplane, a helicopter will not naturally keep flying straight and level for long. Sikes also had nobody guiding him by radio.
In other crashes, nobody reached the controls at all. When a plane loses cabin pressure at high altitude, the passengers pass out along with the pilots. That is how golfer Payne Stewart died in a 1999 Learjet crash. In 2023, a Cessna Citation flew over Washington, D.C., with nobody answering the radio and crashed in Virginia, killing all four people aboard.
Why it hasn't happened on an airliner
Airliners carry two pilots, and long flights carry extra pilots so the crew can rest. When a United 737 captain had a heart attack on a Houston–Seattle flight in 2013, the flight diverted to Boise and the remaining crew landed it, with help from an off-duty United pilot who was aboard. A 2023 Southwest flight went back to Las Vegas and a 2026 PAL Airlines flight diverted to Boston the same way: one pilot fell ill and the other one landed. Both pilots going down at once is extremely rare. Lost cabin pressure can do it, and on Helios 522 it knocked out nearly everyone aboard.
A passenger would also face an unfamiliar cockpit. In the December 2007 Airplane Hour of MythBusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman each tried to land a simulated Boeing 747 with no preparation, and both crashed. On their second tries, with a licensed pilot giving step-by-step instructions over the radio, both landed. The show rated the myth "plausible." In a simulator, though, the instructor was there from the start and crashing cost nothing. A real passenger would first have to work out what the plane was doing and then set dozens of unfamiliar controls for landing. Boeing and Airbus cockpits differ enough that airline pilots need separate training and certification for each model.
Autoland can't take over from any point in a flight at the push of a button. On an airliner equipped for it, autoland can fly the plane down to a runway that has compatible radio equipment, but the crew still has to pick the runway, enter the approach, lower the wheels, extend the flaps (panels on the wings), set the speed and watch the system. Ordinary autopilot mostly holds a heading, speed or altitude. Most small planes have no autoland at all. Some newer light aircraft have a Garmin emergency system that picks an airport and lands on its own. Every landing on this page was flown by hand.
A small plane is a simpler emergency. The passenger usually has a second set of controls in front of them. The plane lands much slower than an airliner and may already be flying straight and level. Controllers can clear other traffic out of the way and pick a long runway. In nearly every survivable case here, an instructor, controller or experienced pilot talked the passenger down by radio.
Small planes still vary a lot. Harrison's Caravan and the King Airs that White and Kinane-Wells landed are turboprops, much faster and more complicated than a training Cessna, and none of the three had flown one before. Darkness makes it harder again: Wildey needed four tries.
How often a pilot becomes unable to fly
Rarely. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau found 98 cases between 1975 and March 2006 in which a medical or physical problem disabled a pilot. Ten were fatal. All ten were on flights with only one pilot, and they killed 24 people. A later Australian study of 2010 to 2014 counted about 23 such events a year, roughly one per 34,000 large passenger flights. Most were stomach illnesses. When a pilot flying alone actually dies in flight, the cause is usually heart or blood-vessel disease. In US private flying, only a handful of accidents in a typical year happen because the pilot couldn't keep flying, and in most of those nobody else is aboard.