On the morning of April 12, 2009, the 56-year-old American Douglas White with his wife and two children returned from a vacation in Florida to his home in Mississippi on a charter two-engine King Air 200, designed for 8-9 passengers.
For 20 years before that, Doug learned to fly on a small single-engine Sessna and even received a license. Shortly before that day, he decided to regain his skills and began studying at Sessna again. The pilot allowed him to sit in the right seat. The equipment of the aircraft was seriously different from what Douglas knew, and he asked how radio communications worked to also listen to conversations with the controllers.
An elderly pilot, a veteran of the Vietnam War, took off and set the autopilot to a smooth set of heights. and fell on the side.
Imagine you are sitting behind the back of a motorcyclist, he is driving straight and suddenly disappears, and you find yourself in the seat alone, and before that only riding a bicycle. You know what to brake, but where is the brake?
Douglas knew what to do, but he didn’t know how. The vast majority of the instruments on the panel were unknown to him, the dead pilot blocked some of them, and he never controlled the aircraft from the right seat. But he knew how to contact the dispatcher.
Doug spoke so confidently on the radio that the controller first decided that the only problem was that the pilot lost consciousness and needed an urgent landing, and the plane was under the control of the second pilot. Douglas had to explain that he was just a passenger who was flying a little on Sessna.
In the U.S., the controller is not obliged to know how to control an aircraft. Luckily for Douglas, on that day in the shift center of Miami worked manager Lisa Grimm, a pilot and an experienced instructor. She didn’t fly to King Air, but she knew how to work with newcomers.
Douglas was very afraid to turn off the autopilot. He saw that the plane continued to gain height despite the fact that the predetermined ten-thousand-foot limit had already been overcome. The pilot did not have time to set the autopilot to the end. If the autopilot is not turned off, the aircraft will continue to gain height, and at some point it will stop reaching speed, it will lose control and fall. Lisa convinced him that the autopilot should be turned off and instructed what and how to do. Disconnecting the autopilot, Douglas faced a new problem: the nose of the aircraft continued to blow up. Adjustments had to be changed. The button was next to my hand, “but I didn’t know.” However, he watched the pilot during the take-off and had time to notice what exactly he was doing. The necessary switch was located somewhere under the pilot’s body.
Douglas called his wife, but to pull the heavy body out of the chair in the narrow cabin she did not have enough strength. As a result, she tightened his seat belt stronger and held the dead pilot behind his shoulders, pressing him to the back of the seat until the end of the flight.
Douglas switched the plane from the height set mode and following the instructions of Lisa Grimm changed the course and began a slow descent.
At this time, the dispatchers worked like a curse, cleaning up the sky and switching the rest of the aircraft to spare frequencies (one pilot turned out to be dumb and clinged into Lisa and Douglas’s talks eight times, until finally switched to another frequency.)
Somewhere half an hour before Douglas a new problem arose: it was necessary to switch the radio to the frequency of airport controllers. Then he said he was very scared because Lisa was his only source of information. The process of switching frequencies was not obvious (it was enough to say that the radio was four pieces and Douglas wasn’t even sure at first which one was his!) And before doing this, he tried to make sure he knew how to get back to the previous one. But he succeeded.
The controller at Fort Myers International Airport was ready. One of them was lucky enough to be a pilot. He had already finished the shift when the boss intercepted him at the exit. But Brian Norton also flew only on the little Cessna and Cherokee. And then it was lucky for the third time: another controller remembered his old friend, the most experienced instructor with a great experience at King Air. He called him on his cell phone and he answered. That Sunday morning, Carrie Sorenson was already sitting in his office, and King Air materials were at his disposal.
Douglas asked the question to the dispatcher, he passed the question to the comrade, the comrade asked Carrie by phone and Carrie answered.
Are you flying on autopilot or are you flying on your own?
“God and I lead him in a couple!
Later, Carrie recalled that when he realized that he was dealing with a pilot, though very inexperienced, he decided to simplify the task to Douglas as much as possible. Let it fly like it is in Seattle. He does not need to try to study additional equipment and instruments for the flight, he is familiar with the main ones, and this is the main thing.
Douglas was very nervous. Behind him were his wife and two daughters. But for his luck, the information passed through a ridiculously long channel of four people without distortions, the weather stood beautiful, the plane was completely right and Douglas got it all. Of course, when he just turned off the autopilot and mastered the flight in manual mode, he was not immediately able to withstand a steady speed (approximately like those who are just learning to drive a car and still do not feel the gas pedal) and it fluctuated within a hundred nodes. But after half an hour, the fluctuations dropped to just ten nodes.
WP was far away. Douglas was waiting for another surprise: King Air had only two lock-off positions, while Cessna, who he knew, had four. But he managed this, and with the release of the chassis, and, most importantly, with the necessary courses, speeds and heights.
And again luck: usually the wind in those places is noticeably stronger, but there was almost no wind that day.
The landing went great, “I sat like a butterfly with his legs hurt,” Douglas recalled later. Having stopped, he realized that he did not know how to turn off the engines and was afraid that someone from the ground rescue services would "fall under the screws." Not immediately, but he did it too.
All negotiations are recorded and available. White’s voice sounds tense but confident. Only once, after landing, he blinked out loud.
The story did not end there. Douglas White decided that now he would definitely become a real pilot. It became them. He obtained a license and over the next ten years he spent more than a thousand hours on... King Air, and among his flights – several rescue missions to Haiti.
The Sources:
https://www.aviaport.ru/digest/2009/04/14/170873.html
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2009/april/14/unintentional-king-air-pilot-an-interview-with-doug-white
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqPvVxxIDr0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq1b2ZfDYDg