A passenger manages to land a plane in Florida after the pilot faints (Video)

MEXICO CITY (appro) .- “I have no idea how to fly the plane,” admitted the passenger who took control of a single-engine Cessna 208 Caravan private plane when speaking with an air traffic controller from a control tower in Florida, United States , after the pilot became “incoherent”.

“I have a very serious situation here, on board,” said the passenger on Tuesday, May 10, and after explaining the problem, he acknowledged that he had never flown a plane, BBC Mundo reported.

The plane carrying two people besides the pilot was flying at an altitude of 9,100 feet near South Florida and was guided by air traffic controllers in Fort Pierce. He landed at Palm Beach International Airport.

Information from the FlightAware site showed that the plane departed from Marsh Harbour, in the Bahamas. After an hour and a half, Robert Morgan, a flight controller, tried to locate the plane, local television station WPBF reported.

“What is your position?” he asked the inexperienced pilot, who replied: “I have no idea”, according to what was heard in the recording of the call, on the LiveATC.net site.

He later commented that he could see the Florida coast ahead, but he didn’t know the exact location.

The passenger asked shortly after: “Guys, have you located me? I can’t even get my navigation screen to turn on. Do you have any idea about that?” he asked.

Morgan, the flight controller who is also a flight instructor, gave him a quick introductory aeronautics class.

“Try to keep the wings level and see if you can start to descend. Push the controls forward and descend at a very slow pace,” Morgan said, according to the audio.

But another problem arose. Morgan had never flown a Cessna model, so it was difficult for him to tell the passenger how to land the plane.

He said that he looked for an image of the panel design of this type of plane and thus guided him to the international airport, because it is larger and has a wider runway, which would facilitate the task of the passenger who was piloting the plane.

Video obtained by local television station WPBF showed the Cessna slowly landing on the runway.

“I was very happy that everything went well and that no one was hurt,” Morgan told the television station. He said that he went to the track to hug his impromptu student.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office incident report stated that at 12:27 p.m. local time Tuesday, police received a notification that the pilot was “unconscious” and that a passenger was flying the aircraft.

Finally, the plane was located about 10 kilometers southwest of Palm Beach International Airport.

By then the most complicated part of the process was missing: guiding it to the airport and landing, one of the most complicated flight maneuvers even for professional pilots.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA, for its acronym in English) indicated in a statement that the pilot would have suffered a medical problem and that they are investigating the incident.

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