![]() They are advised not to touch the controls, but to sit back and fasten their seat belts. Passengers are kept informed about what is happening via messages on a screen and voice announcements. Once landed, it applies the brakes to bring the plane to a halt. As it approaches touchdown, it crabs the plane slightly sideways to cope with any crosswinds and aligns the nose with the centre of the runway, just as a human pilot would. It then flies to that airport, descends, lines up on the runway, sets the flaps and lowers the landing gear. Landing the thing safely takes a miracle. It is tricky enough for a neophyte to keep an aircraft flying straight, level and on an appropriate bearing to arrive at a suitable airfield. Occasionally, an instructor on the ground, perhaps assisted by a pilot flying alongside in another aircraft, has been able to provide an instant flying lesson to someone on board a plane that has lost its pilot, and talk them down successfully. In three of these the aircraft suffered what is known euphemistically in aviation circles as a “collision with terrain”. But an Australian report published in 2016 listed 15 cases in the five years from 2010 to 2014 of the pilots of small aircraft being incapacitated. ![]() ![]() How often such things happen is not well recorded. The plane crashed shortly afterwards, killing all four. One of the other three people on board, a student aviator, had taken over the controls, but to no avail. The pilot seemed to have suffered a heart attack. On 9 November 2018 a Piper Dakota light aircraft flying over Iowa broadcast a distress call.
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