On Jun 18, 12:13*am, Wingnut wrote:
On Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:10:01 -0700, Dudley Henriques wrote:
It helped certainly that this nice lady had flying experience but it
was by NO MEANS essential to what she was asked to do or what she
actually did in the cockpit.

Had the Captain opted to, he most certainly could have completed the
flight to a safe completion from the left seat without assistance. He
might have had to extend his reach a bit at times, but nothing earth
shattering for sure.

All in all, this was a class crew and they did a class job, right down
to the stew who very classily and politely deflated the media hype on
her role in the completion of this flight.

Consider who would have been landing the plane if something had caused
the pilot to also conk out, though. Then her prior flight experience
would have become quite relevant indeed.

Actually her prior light plane flying experience could be a negative
believe it or not. Her ability to follow explicit instruction
resulting in any control input involves an aircraft time
line requiring a response to input correction involving an input to
initiate and an input to stop the response. Assuming a requirement for
a correct result each and every time a control input was initiated,
prior experience in a light plane enters the element of expectation
into the input equation for the newbie. In other words, the difference
between the actual result of any manual control input to a 767's
controls in any and all axis, especially when coupled, roll/
yaw.......pitch/roll etc.....by a newbie needing the result to be
right the first time tried from verbal instruction with the newbie
having an expected response based on a totally different airplane
places an EXTRA element into the equation that could easily extend/
alter/ or change the required response time line.
This scenario could easily make the correction time line longer than
it might have been had no expectation of aircraft response been
involved.
All this is just a fancy way of saying that prior experience in a
Cessna 150 might not matter in a 767 being landed by a newbie
following detailed instruction.
DH