An unnamed passenger with “no flying experience” was able to land a private plane at Palm Beach International Airport, Florida on 10 May.
In a LiveATC.net audio recording, published by CNN, the male passenger can be heard telling air traffic control about 70 miles north of his final destination:
"I've got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent, and I have no idea how to fly the airplane".
“Roger. What’s your position?” a dispatcher is heard responding.
“I have no idea. I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea”, the passenger reportedly said.
“Maintain wings level and just try to follow the coast, either north or southbound. We’re trying to locate you”, advised the controllers.
Judging by the audio, for the next four minutes the passenger of the single-engine Cessna 208 appeared to remain calm, waiting for the air traffic controller to find the aircraft.
“Have you guys located me yet?” he is heard asking, adding: “I can't even get my nav screen to turn on. It has all the information on it. You guys have any ideas on that?”
Some four minutes later, the air traffic control at Palm Beach Airport located the 38-foot-long air plane about 25 miles north of Palm Beach in Boca Raton, and they were able to instruct the man to carry out a descent.
At one point in the audio the passenger was told to "push forward on the controls and descend at a very slow rate".
A video of what appeared to be a safe and steady landing was published by WPBF.
“You just witnessed a couple passengers land that plane”, the tower operator can be heard telling an American Airlines pilot waiting to take off.
According to subsequent reports in US media outlets, the controller working at Palm Beach, Robert Morgan, an FAA certified flight instructor, printed out a layout of the cockpit and used it to talk the passenger through landing the plane.
“I just feel like it was probably meant to happen”, he was cited as saying later, as he revealed he had been out on a break reading a book when the emergency call came in.
“I just had to keep him calm, point him to the runway and tell him how to reduce the power so he could descend to land. Before I knew it, he was like, ‘I'm on the ground. How do I turn this thing off?’” he added.
It was reported that the pilot of the plane was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital, with his condition not yet clear.
Two people were on board the single-engine Cessna 208 when the pilot had a "possible medical issue", the Federal Aviation Administration investigating the incident was reported as saying.