Ping for later
he needs to land into the wind at a speed just above stall with full flaps and gear down and then hit the reverse thrusters just as he touches the ground.
Depends on the model of 767: not all HAVE Fuel Jettison capability:
http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/commercial/airports/faqs/fueldump.pdf
Good fiction needs to have a base in reality to be believable.
Your ersatz pilot would need more than intelligence to pull this off. He would need a basic understanding of aviation. Even then, a successful outcome would be unlikely.
Look up Gimli Glider.
Some knowledge of approach speeds and landing configurations would be necessary for any off airport landing, but it is doable.
and the pilot is shot
***************
co-pilot lands the plane at the nearest airport.
What the other freeper said ,, slow and dirty , gear , flaps , just above stall ,, crabbing .. whatever it takes... as for fire and dumping fuel I don’t know if the complexity of the craft would allow for someone unfamiliar to do anything beyond basic flight controls. It would likely be an unsurvivable crash as it would be at 140+ with obstructions..
If I had to pick a most survivable scenario it would be a wide flat beach area (low tide) ,, gear up .. and the gentlest descent possible,, what I know of Italian mountain terrain (from WW2 epics) doesn’t give me hope for a crash landing there.
While it is doable, unless he spent a lot of time on a decent simulator/simulator program that is set to a transport category airplane, he will either over-control the plane and cartwheel it, or stall it and impact out of control in a very unsurvivable crash.
Basic knowledge is not enough, it takes experience with a jet aircraft of that size.
Okay, first, you’ve got to be out of fuel, otherwise there is a fireball and no one survives, then, you have to be going really slow, or the entire airplane turns in to a billion razor blades, and no one survives, and finally, you need a really, really, really lucky hero.
Why does he have to land right away? First, if this at the end of the trip there is no need to dump fuel, the only time you dump fuel is if you have excessive weight for landing....
Take-off weight can exceed landing weight for many cargo jets....
Not all jets have fuel dump capability...if you need to lose fuel weight to land, declare an emergency and fly around for a couple of hours and burn off some fuel then land....
Find a lake, and stall it in. Since the flyer has no experience in the cockpit and won’t know about gear or flaps, water is a bigger cushion than land and he can make the mistake of pulling up the nose just before he contacts and belly it in. He can then shoot out the cockpit glass and crawl out before it sinks. Hope he can swim?
red
Just do like Hollywood does and ignore physics. LOL
Windsor 114 in DH2 would never have blown up like that. They were very low on fuel. Sure, they may have had an initial explosion, as fumes/air/spark can cause one, but they would never have burned like that, there simply wouldn't have been any fuel to sustain the burn.
A few lines of backstory would make whatever he does more plausible to the reader. If military he could have flown in a flight simulator on a base. I did when I was a marine (avionics, not as a pilot). I crashed landed on dozens of air craft carriers.
If no military history, have his father own a small plane and him playing flight simulators as a kid. There are million ways to add a touch of backstory that will help.
Last but not least, remember you are writing fiction, not a manual. Close counts in fiction and hand grenades.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” - Ernest Hemingway
Too short a section of road, and probably too narrow for the main gear. Doesn’t sound like your hero is long for this world.
Mr. Peel suggests you look at the movie: Executive Action — in this movie, Kurt Russel a student light aircraft pilot, is thrown into a situation of flying a large 747. Mr. Russell, himself is an actual private pilot. Without any aviation experience, it’s unlikely the amateur could land safely. Having knowledge of only physics does not prepare you for which controls to use. If you don’t know what the primary speed control or altitude control are and how to use them, you will crash the plane.
Have your hero engage the autopilot and set it to assist an emergency landing, with the hero relying on his limited knowledge as a private pilot. Write it so that the fuel load was mostly expended during the flight and the aircraft is empty of cargo. That will make it relatively light and thus easier to land and quicker to stop after landing. Your hero’s grasp of physics makes him realize that under such conditions, he has a chance of surviving a crash landing on the mountain road that he selects.
As #3. Plane skids beyond road bed onto gentle uphill snowy slope. Comes to rest in the snow at a fairly steep angle. Hero escapes. Plane slides back down the slope, past the road bed, and off the side of the mountain. As it falls it triggers an avalanche which buries it. As near to a covert insertion as you could wish given your parameters.
What you’re suggesting is beyond McGuyver implausible.
Knowing that an airplane somehow uses flaps and landing gear during the landing sequence does not equate to knowing why they’re used. Or how. Or when. F’rinstance, deploying the flaps will cause the a/c to pitch up. The pilot’s mnemonic is “flaps down, nose down,” which is advice to be prepared to push forward on the yoke to hold the nose down as the flaps are deploying (then adjust the trim so you don’t have to continue fighting), else the plane will pitch up and “balloon.” Anyone unfamiliar with this probably will lose attitude control at that point, which, if you’ve already slowed for landing, will move the a/c off the desired approach slope and could lead to a stall. But before reaching a stall condition, the stick shaker will fire.
Stick shaker is a stall warning alarm that causes the yoke to vibrate fiercely. And if you didn’t know what it was, it probably would make you think you’d better go look for a parachute, because you done broke the plane. And if stick shaker firing causes you to hesitate (and you could see where it might cause the uninitiated to do just that) and the a/c slows even more, then the stick pusher fires. The flight control system actually applies about 75 pounds of (forward) force to the yoke to help you lower the nose.
And since your boy isn’t a pilot, he doesn’t have a clue that stick shaker exists. Or stick pusher. So meeting either first-hand probably will make him soil his BVDs.
Likewise, lowering the gear has a dramatic impact on drag — and hence airspeed — and if you aren’t prepared for the increased sink rate, or if you don’t add power to compensate, soiled drawers will be the least of your worries.
If you’re thinking the autopilot could save him, fuggedabout it. For the autopilot to fly the approach and landing would require the use of radio navigational aids, and the published landing chart information will have been predicated on the relationship of these navaids to the runway. They’re of no use when landing off-airfield.
The one thing working in your guy’s favor is the flight crew’s take-off and landing data card (TOLD). Landing any a/c, but particularly the “big iron,” is an exercise in scrubbing off kinetic energy by means of drag management. The plan is to add drag and slow gradually and incrementally so as to be be at precise airspeeds when arriving at different critical nodes. These precise airspeeds are based on the a/c’s calculated stall speed at the intended point of landing, a calculation known as Vref (vee-ref). http://bit.ly/2jwApBw
The crew will have calculated Vref and all the other relevant numbers in advance and recorded their calculations on this TOLD card, which is posted conspicuously in the middle of the yoke so they can reference it as needed. http://oi66.tinypic.com/2q32o2f.jpg
Provided your boy is shrewd enough to interpret the data, it’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t account for the fact that what he needs is numbers for a short field landing, not the normal landing the crew based those numbers for. Plus these numbers were calculated for arrival at the planned destination. Performance data for where he’s being forced to land could be much different. Plus, if they haven’t yet flown as far as the intended point of landing, the a/c will be heavier because it hasn’t burned the planned amount of fuel. Which means the TOLD card numbers all will be too low, and the two things you never want to be in any airplane is too low or too slow.
Ultimately, regardless how smart your guys is, what probably will kill him is that the airspeed of a quarter-million pound airplane takes MUCH longer to respond to changes in power and drag (and return to a ‘stable’ condition) than a Cessna 150, which means if you don’t have a pretty good idea exactly where to move the throttle quadrant to when you change the power setting, or you don’t know exactly where (in space and time) to deploy the next notch of flaps, or you don’t know exactly where (in space and time) to lower the gear, he’s going to waste seconds chasing the proper setting. And when you’re moving at 150 knots (250 feet per second), you have very few seconds to waste.
Not to mention, the slower the a/c gets, the mushier the controls get, and it takes a practiced hand not to overcontrol in the seconds before touchdown, when airspeed is slowest. And I’m ignoring the fact that, in the mountains, there’s almost always crosswinds to contend with.
But don’t think his troubles are at an end when the wheels touch down. He still needs to know how to steer, and how to bring the a/c to a halt as swiftly as possible (made all the more critical because it’s a short field). Top of the list, how does he know the a/c has a steering tiller (on the console to the captain’s left) that controls steering through the nose wheel? (Hint: the yoke, which would appear to be a sort of “steering wheel,” serves no steering function whatsoever on the ground) Does he know how to apply reverse thrust? Does he know where the brakes are on an airplane? Or the speed brakes (spoilers)?
The shorter the field, the more critical he uses every braking asset available. If he can’t steer, can’t reverse thrust, can’t brake or can’t deploy the speed brakes, he’s just hurtling along at 200 feet per second in an out-of-control aluminum tube.
My advice is to pretend you’re a global warming advocate: ignore the science and just make crap up.
