It was luck! It was extremely good luck that the Captain, Bob Pearson, happened to also be a very experienced glider pilot and that the acting First Officer, Maurice Quintal, had done his Air Force training out of Gimli and remembered that Gimli existed.
Apart from navigating to Gimli, the actual landing is what I meant. So if it was luck I assume you mean it is unlikely to happen again (if they were given a chance to do it a 2nd time). Maybe you're right. Although maybe he was just better at managing energy than most other pilots (perhaps due to his gliding experience)...
The guy that landed the Air Transat A330-200 in 2001 also did a nice job (on the gliding and landing part). I can't find much info on if he also had any good gliding experience... all I could find was that he flew bush planes before.
Anyway my point is. I reckon most crews would fail in such a situation... but 1 in every x-many will make it. That's the only point I was trying to make there.
Experience. Something you lack.
If I had it, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The entire point of the thread is to find out if an untrained pilot is capable of landing a jet.
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Actually it brings me onto something else... anyone here use PMDG's new 737NGX? I think they claim that it's 90-something % realistic. Ok so the ground effect and touch down in FSX (along with complicated weather conditions) are probably not very realistic, but the general flight model is "meant" to be pretty accurate... so am I right in saying that's kind of a lie since no one here seems to buy any of it?
And also... if someone says "well they would use it to train pilots then" - I would assume the reason they don't is due to the fact that the level of immersion compared to a full motion sim is rather crap. And it doesn't allow for crew interaction training etc...
but theoretically there is no reason why they can't model the flight dynamics correctly in cheap home simulators with the computer technology that's around us these days.
Please note I am just curious and am not trying to start a war about how accurate these things are as I completely accept that FSX will not be able to fully represent reality (and I can assume that from my experience on the 3 props that I have flown for real)... that having said, it's not far off (ground effect is a bit rubbish in FSX)!! Not sure how about the jets though...