What to Do When the Passenger Must Become the Pilot : ‘Pinch-Hitter’ Course Teaches How to Take Over in an Emergency

Peggy Weddell gazed out the right front window of a Cessna 172 at an even line of oil rigs dotting the sea 3,500 feet below.

A reluctant passenger who had flown in a small plane only once before, Weddell was just beginning to enjoy the sensation of being airborne when the pilot quietly collapsed against the door panel on the left side of the plane.

Weddell tuned in the numbers 121.5 KHZ (the international emergency frequency) on the radio, and reached for the microphone. “The pilot is unconscious and I don’t know how to fly,” she said.

‘How Much Fuel?’

“How much fuel do you have?” a voice came back.

“Five hours.”

“Do you know what a transponder is?” the controller asked.

Weddell said she did, then set the knobs on a black box in the panel so that the numbers matched a setting she had memorized. (The transponder is an instrument that allows the craft to be identified on radar from the ground.)

“Very good, ma’am. We’ve got you on radar now,” the controller said after a long pause. “You’re five miles east of Santa Barbara airport. We’re going to get you down.”

When Weddell, 36, turned the control wheel toward the red roofs of Santa Barbara and felt the plane lurch in response to her touch, the fear she felt was quite real--even though she knew the emergency was not.

The pilot had simulated a collapse in order to allow Weddell, a drafting supervisor for a computer firm, to try out the lessons she had learned at a “pinch-hitter” course she had attended the night before. A concept originated in 1963 by the Air Safety Foundation of the Airplane Owners and Pilots Assn., the pinch-hitter class is designed to teach non-pilots who fly frequently in small planes how to get the plane back to earth in the event the pilot is suddenly incapacitated.

Although no one seems to keep records on how often this actually occurs, such incidents appear in the news with enough regularity that most pilots take the possibility seriously, Tom Gallagher said. Director of ground training for Santa Barbara Aviation, a flight school and air charter service, Gallagher offers a pinch-hitter course several times a year. The San Fernando chapter of the 99’s, an international organization of women pilots, provides similar training in what they call a “flying companion seminar.” Elsewhere, the class is taught under the name of copilot instruction.

Tripled in Size

“Every time I’ve held one of these classes, within a week there it is (a real-life incident reported),” Gallagher said. “Only this time it happened a week before.” Gallagher produced a recent clipping from a Santa Barbara paper reporting that when the pilot of a single-engine Cessna--bound from Chicago to St. Louis--died in mid-flight, his passenger, a non-pilot, was successful in making “a perfect landing.” Gallagher said his class tripled in size after that item appeared.

Although the hero in that incident was not known to have attended a pinch-hitter class, the emergency training did figure in a similar situation two years ago when a 78-year-old non-pilot, Editha Merrill, saved herself and two passengers by landing the plane after their pilot died of a heart attack over Sedona, Ariz. A back-seat passenger who had just completed a pinch-hitter course was able to make contact on the radio and communicate with controllers on the ground. She then relayed step-by-step instructions to Merrill at the controls.

The scenario can also end tragically. Gallagher told the class about a recent disaster in the South in which four people were killed when the pilot lost consciousness during the flight. The controller asked a non-pilot who was to take over the controls to turn on the transponder, Gallagher said. The stand-in pilot apparently believed the instrument was critical to their survival (it wasn’t), and panicked when she realized she didn’t know where it was located. Gallagher thinks the victims in this case might have been saved if one of them had known something about the instrument panel.

“People think it takes more knowledge than it actually does to fly a plane,” Gallagher said. “Just knowing a few facts can enable you to get that plane on the ground.” Given two hours of training, said Gallagher, a novice need not feel overwhelmed in an emergency.

The pinch-hitter course designed by the Air Safety Foundation includes four hours of air time and students make as many as four landings.

Gallagher contends that anyone who flies frequently in a private plane should be required to complete a pinch-hitter course. Even if an emergency never occurs, he said, the experience can transform a timid flyer into a bold and involved flying companion.

Peggy Weddell, for instance, doesn’t intend to spend a lot of time in small planes, and it’s unlikely she’ll ever find herself in a predicament like the one she enacted in the sky. But a number of her friends are private pilots, and Weddell said since taking the class she feels more comfortable in the air.

Dick Busch of the Air Safety Foundation based in Frederick, Md., said that 30% of all people who complete pinch-hitter courses go on to become private pilots themselves. A number of the pinch-hitter students are executives who fly frequently in company jets, said Busch. (Gallagher said that because corporate jets are more complex to operate, the odds of a novice pilot successfully landing one in an emergency are not good.)

Linda Keep, a loan officer in Santa Barbara, has been accompanying her architect-husband Doug on business and pleasure trips for eight years. While she never had much concern for her own safety in the air, Keep, 35, said she wants to be prepared for an emergency now that their two toddlers and a dog travel with them in the family plane.

“I’ve been flying with Doug for years and I’m observant,” she said. “I’ve always been confident I could get the plane down if I had to. I’ll be darned if I’m going to crash the plane.”

The recent Santa Barbara class was a little late getting started due to a violent spring storm that had snarled highway 101. Black clouds had pushed their way over the Santa Ynez Mountains, filling the sky with rain and wind. Once everyone was assembled, Gallagher pointed to a poster of the control panel of a Cessna training plane. The students were attentive, no doubt imagining themselves alone in the sky on a night like this one.

“What’s that cord right there?” a student asked, studying the diagram.

“Don’t worry about that, it’s nothing,” Gallagher answered.

“How about that thing with three red buttons on it?” asked another class member.

“Forget it, it’s the clock,” the instructor replied.

The point to this abbreviated flight class apparently was to identify just which dials and gauges were necessary to fly and land the plane, and which were beyond the scope of emergency procedures.

“The first thing you have to do is to let someone know you’re in trouble,” Gallagher said. A would-be pinch-hitter is doomed if he or she can’t locate the radio or isn’t able to dial in a frequency where the message can be intercepted. Some make the simple mistake of not releasing the button on the microphone in order to hear the controller’s reply to their distress call.

“You should know where you are,” Gallagher added. Short of knowing an exact location, “you can tell the controller when you left, where you’re heading and how long you’ve been flying. In the meantime, if you leave the plane alone, it’s probably flying all right. All you’re trying to do is not to get it flipped over or to stall it (a stall occurs when there is insufficient air flow over the wing to keep the plane aloft, Gallagher explained). Odds are then you can get it down.”

Jim Madsen, 25, held one arm protectively around his pregnant wife, Azimina, as they studied the control panel mock-up together. A product manager for an electronics firm, Madsen said he got his pilot’s license six months ago, and he was obviously pleased to be sharing his newly learned aviation terminology with his wife, a human resources administrator.

Gallagher took the class through the basics--determining altitude and available flight time (“pilots work in time, not gallons”), how to keep the air speed constant and the plane more or less straight and level. Within minutes of a distress call, the control tower will probably have a plane in the air flying within sight, Gallagher told the class. Chances are controllers will steer the plane toward the largest nearby airport, possibly a military field with long runways and emergency vehicles on hand.

“Maybe by now you’ve calmed down a little bit because you’ve been flying successfully for five or 10 minutes,” he said. “We’ve turned around. We’ve lined it up. We’re 10 miles out from the runway. Now we’ve got to get down. . . .”

Peggy Weddell was extremely quiet. She said she gets that way when she’s nervous. With Gallagher issuing commands from the back seat (he was acting as the controller on the ground), Weddell had managed to line up the craft with the airport. She kept her eyes on a device Gallagher referred to as “the miniature airplane,” known to pilots as the attitude indicator.

“All right. We’re going to make a slight descent now,” Gallagher said. “See the throttle by your left knee? Pull it back slightly. Do not touch the red knob (the fuel mixture control; pulling it all the way back would stop the engine). Slowly move it back a few inches. Pull back just a little. Don’t let it go down too fast. What’s your air speed now?”

“80.”

“Do you see the runway?” Gallagher asked. “It’s approximately 3 miles ahead to the left. Don’t get much slower now than 80,” he added, concerned about stalling at this low altitude. “Do what you have to with the control wheel now to keep the runway straight ahead.”

If she could have taken her eyes off the panel long enough to look around, Weddell would have seen students jogging on the beaches below, cars pulling out of the long driveways of Hope Ranch estates, gardeners toiling. Life went on at its usual pace in Santa Barbara, while in the air, Weddell was living in accelerated time. She said later she had fully convinced herself the incapacitated-pilot scenario was real. She forgot all about the healthy pilot slumped beside her, and concentrated on the control panel, she said, as if it were a video game.

As the runway loomed just yards ahead, sudden turbulence made the plane swing side to side. Weddell panicked, thinking she was doing something with the controls to cause the rocking.

“Pull back. Pull back, ma’am,” Gallagher said with urgency. “Pull the power back all the way.”

The plane’s wheels hit the runway with only a slight jolt. Gallagher awarded Weddell a log book showing that she had clocked half an hour flight time including straight and level flying, turns and descents and one landing.

Pilot Michael Arends recovered consciousness, and calmly said to Weddell, “Not bad.”