Pilot to ToI: If relief pilots hadn’t been on flydubai plane, passenger could’ve landed it in miracle ‘gentle crash’

Yaniv Hayun, one of the Israelis who helped subdue the flydubai copilot who stabbed the captain in an apparent attempt to crash the plane, grabbed the plane’s controls and says he learned from the TV show “Air Disasters” how to pull the levers to fly the plane upward.

After that, two off-duty flydubai pilots took over and landed the plane safely in Saudi Arabia.

If those pilots weren’t on the flight, could an untrained passenger such as Yaniv have landed it safely?

It is theoretically possible for a passenger to land it in “a gentle crash,” a commercial pilot tells The Times of Israel. “Most people could walk away.”

But the passenger would have to know how to get on the radio with a flight tower first, he says.

“You have to be a very smart person who can take a lot of instruction over the radio,” the pilot explains. “They would probably send them to a very, very long runway.”

“If he had the radio in his ear, you could listen to the radio and someone could talk you through,” he continues, cautioning that “It’d be a very big miracle.”

Of course, someone with experience flying small planes would have a huge advantage.

“A guy who flew a Cessna would be able to line up a plane,” says the pilot. He added, however, “Now, it wouldn’t be a pretty landing.”