Oh dear.

Interested, I'd offer you the advice to calm down, but I know you won't take it. I will not be dragged into a 'my dad's bigger than your dad' style argument over hours and experience, because my point was that this is a thread which should be about a good story in the news and credit to the student pilot.

Noone wants to know how much better you would have been in the same situation because you have soooo much experience.

Now chill out.

The lady deserves congratulations for her effort, not mealy mouthed detraction. At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, if she were a male she'd have big ones, made of brass.

You are spot on in one respect, Pandora. I won't be taking advice from the 'frozen' likes of you. So why waste your time offering it?

No doubt my pointing to your lack of experience was frustrating for you, but you deserved it after your prior post.

I agree that "this is a thread which should be about a good story in the news and credit to the student pilot" and I wish that it was just that. Sadly, I fear, it is far from that and is instead yet another yarn from 'the centre of the universe' that seeks to elevate to glorious heroism a simple act of well executed self-preservation.

The fact that you have too often in the past swallowed such 'hollywood' is surely indicated by your frequent use of expressions such as 'chill out'. No doubt your favourite footballers and golfers are also, in your mind, 'heroes'. And I bet you regularly eat at McDonalds, too. <img src="eek.gif" border="0">

Interested

If I were a passenger in that plane I would regard Medlanie Oswalt as a hero. I suspect the actual passengers also see her as a hero.

slj, good for you. And you've posted that opinion for the world to see. Well done. I can't wait to read the NTSB report on this one! Hahaha. :)

Well done that Lady! <img src="smile.gif" border="0"> . .Do you think any of the airlines will be queuing up to give her a %100 airline sponsership towards the atpl?. .Oh yes - best wishes for a swift recovery to the incapacitated pilot, regradless of his background.

interested, you are not a professional pilot. I don't care whether you have 10,000 hours, you have not gone through the hoops the rest of us professional pilots have. Your views, whilst allowed here, are not really relevant once you ceded the moral high ground by taking away some of the thunder of what most of us regard as a 'heroic' act by someone who is not even qualified as a pilot yet never mind the fact that Melanie Oswalt only had 50 hours of instruction in a light single.

You have a persistent habit of nitpicking away at certain threads on PPRuNe and to be perfectly honest you are becoming as irritating as The Guvnor who whilst possibly lurking is not welcome on here anymore. You have made your point and yet you continue to nit-pick away at anyone who commends Melanie Oswalt as being a heroine.

I really don't care how much fast jet time you have. If you were put in a situation with only 50 hours of basic instruction in a light single and had to take over a C421, at night I would put the odds as highly against you recovering to an airport where you walked away from the aircraft. You 'assume' you would have been able to do so after 50 hours but you will never know will you? At least Melanie Oswalt has that knowledge and experience.

So 'interested', give it a rest. You've made your point but by persisting with your pedantic criticism of anyone who feels that Melanie Oswalt deserves tha accolade of a 'heroine' you only make yourself appear to be frustrated that it wasn't you who happened to be in that C421 at the time.. . <img src="rolleyes.gif" border="0">

Captain PPRuNe - I'm sure the majority participating in this thread will join me in thanking you for that response. Interested - why waste your life as a cynic?

May I say that girl's got b*lls? Perhaps a little larger than some of our male contributors!

Well Captain, at the risk of your immediately, and arbitrarily, banning me from this site (as you have so frequently done to others), I will simply say that I am NOT ‘The Guvnor’, that you have absolutely no knowledge of what ‘hoops’ I have had to jump through, and that the simple fact that I do not earn a living as a pilot does not mean I am not a professional pilot in at least one very important sense.

The remainder of the points you make are childish and utterly unworthy of my reply. Now off you go and remove all my posts and ban me forever from playing with your train set. In answer to your recent question as put to me on the PPRuNe/Astraeus thread when I suggested you might ban me, a ‘benevolent dictator’ you most certainly are not. Just a dictator. :)

Check 6, mail sent off, thanx for link.

The lady did wonderfully!

Getting dumped in a dark cockpit of a complex piston twin, keeping it out of the drink (JFK jr. had a whole bunch more hours and was flying in his own plane) and then having the smarts to go to a familiar airport and make a survivable landing is quite a feat for somebody coming straight out of a 152, especially if all her experience had been day VFR. Maybe she had done a bit of the instrument and night work which would really come in handy in this situation.

I remember my own comm failure at night where I was tuning the radio and making calls without hearing anybody until the flashlight showed me the on/off switch <img src="rolleyes.gif" border="0">

the simple fact that I do not earn a living as a pilot does not mean I am not a professional pilot in at least one very important sense.

If your real life persona is as obnoxious as your online persona I very much doubt if you could earn a living as a pilot.....

theRolfe

What an extraordinary thing to happen to this young girl and how fortunate the other passengers - and the pilot - were that she happened to be on board.

And what a feeling of accomplishment, of having come through a test that anyone would dread to face for real. Let's hope it all - including the probably unwanted publicity - helps to strengthen her.

And as for the "heroine/not heroine" what a load of off-track nonsense! By any standard of defining heroism, she passes.

Reckon she's someone you might want to drag to draft to the next Gatbash, even if it means chipping in to pay for the ticket. I'll contribute any day.

Well done Melanie,. .At night,minimal hours, unfamiliar aircraft Pilot possibly dying, and u can sure as hell bet the pax weren't very quiet either, businessmen passengers? I wonder at what point she told them to "Shut the f**k up, i got a plane to land" lol. .I sent my e-mail, it was a job well done. All of us Pilots, be we professional, recreational, or trainees, should hope that we can handle an emergency with this degree of skill. The girl done well, and cape Air should sponsor her, she's already proven , she has the "Right Stuff"

Tony

Yup have to agree, well done. As a 50 hour student I'd have been terrified, particularly at night in twin!

"Interested" you are mistaken in assuming someone with a "Frozen" ATPL has less than 1500 hours experience I had over 3500hrs at ATPL issue, only lacking night flying, a not un-common situation for "self-improving" ex instructors.

I sent the young lady a message to tell her that I would be glad to one day be the 'non-flying (handling)' pilot for her, on any legs in our planes, and by the way, certainly offer her all of the spokes, versus just the hub legs.

I hope that if she develops the flying bug, she can push herself through a very long tunnel via the very expensive training and terrible initial pay as a civilian flight instructor/regional FO.

Interested,

Sorry that I "trouble" you - however, reading through the entire thread, I'm delighted to note that it isn't just me that causes you alarm. It's everyone else too. You see, I don't think there is anyone that could assure the rest of us that after 50 hours on a 152, they could perform well in said situation.

You seem to doubt what I say in my post. I don't know why. Yes, my e-mail address contains the name Cessna, when I'm rated on a Piper. Wow! As it happens, I created the address specifically for when I was away in Scotland, having been sponsored by the RAF through 20 hours of C152 training. All my subsequent training has been in the PA-28. All of which is utterly irrelevant anyway, as the situation does not change a jot.

If the thought of being in Melanie's situation doesn't strike some kind of emotion into you, then I suggest it is YOU that has the problem.

Maybe you need to open up a little?

(Check 6, e-mail sent. Many thanks).

My thanks to whomever posted Ms Oswalt's address; email left my laptop 10 minutes ago. As a non pilot I have read this thread with great interest, curious to see the reactions of the "pros". The overwhelmong consensus is that she really saved the day for those business men, (the visual of this 20 something girl telling the EVP of paperclips to "shaddup, I have a plane to land" made me chuckle. May I suggest then that "Interested" be boxed out because it would appear that he is lighting everyone up with his rant. I suspect that in similar situations he'd be the one in back screaming like a three month old. Instead of responding to him, email Ms Oswalt with your positive comments. A better use of time don't you think? :-) :-)

interested,

What exactly is your point? So, after 50 hours, you would have been qualified and able to land such an aircraft in such a situation. Well, if that's the case, good for you.

This young woman, however, wasn't qualified to do so. She hadn't had the advantage of having flown anything resembling the type of aircraft she had to take over, suddenly, with no instruction, at night, with pax, in stressful conditions. A pretty steep learning curve, I'd say. Any pilot knows that learning to fly a new type in such conditions would be difficult to say the least. Fast Jet Wannabe probably isn't the only one who'd find it terrifying - just the most honest.

My description of that would be heroism. If you call it something else, OK. Aren't we just arging semantics here?

Or, reading between the lines of your post, are you - just maybe - jealous? :)

Wow. I just read this thread and I cant believe how well this lady did. 400 series Cessna is a big old lump to chuck around the sky, and BTW I imagine she still had the other guy at the controls. Over his side would be the landing lights and the landing gear lever, which is tucked in tight alongside the throttle quadrant, and would therefore be very difficult to find in a dark cockpit if unfamiliar.. .What a hero.