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When Darren Harrison, a passenger in a Cessna Caravan returning from a fishing trip in the Bahamas, saw that the pilot had become incapacitated and the plane was now in a nosedive, he needed to act quick or perish. And he did. It wasn’t a miracle, but it was darn good airplane wrangling by someone with no experience doing any of it. He had to reach over the body of that pilot to wrest the controls from him and then get himself into the seat where the pilot had been and take control of the plane.
Luckily, Harrison, who had been relaxing barefoot in the back of the plane, knew two things. He had a pretty good grasp of how planes fly, and he knew enough to ask for help. Seeing the plane nosediving and the Atlantic waters growing closer, he knew that he had to stop that descent. But he also knew that he shouldn’t just haul back on the yoke lest bad things happen. He was worried, specifically, that hauling back on the yoke could tear the wings off. Yup.
Once he averted immediate disaster, he called the controllers and asked for help. Which they gave him. He had to insinuate himself into the pilot’s seat—how he did that is not quite clear—and he knew he had to talk to controller to figure out what to do.
One big detail the mainstream press got wrong, though not NBC in its interview with Darren Harrison, was to give the impression that the passenger pilot pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and taught himself how to fly the plane and found the airport himself and landed all because of his heroic spirit. One wonders if he served peanuts, too. That part is totally wrong.
Harrison did do a great job, but he likely wouldn’t have been around to do the talk show circuit had it not been for controllers Chip Flores and Robert Morgan, who knew exactly what to tell Harrison by way of instruction and what not to tell him.
Morgan, a part-time flight instructor, was instrumental. He did two things that probably saved the day. He directed Harrison to the longest runway around those parts, Palm Beach International, and he let Harrison fly in a way that got him to the destination. For example, when Harrison put the flaps of the Caravan down, he immediately said he was having trouble controlling the plane. Can a Caravan land with no landing flaps? It can indeed. Whether Morgan knew that or only guessed it, he told Harrison to go ahead and put the flaps back up. The landing used a lot of runway, but Harrison, who again was smart enough to know what he didn’t know, asked how to slow it down, and Morgan relayed the info about the brakes—for non-pilots, the whole concept of where the brakes are and how they work is not only weird but completely counterintuitive. Harrison nailed it, though.
By the end, he was even feeling so confident he offered to taxi the Caravan into parking, an offer that ATC declined.
It’s not often that pilots can take flying lessons from non-pilots, but we should all listen to the big things that he did right. He knew to react now, but not to overreact—famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden referred to this attitude as, “be quick but don’t hurry.” Harrison embodied the Wizard of Westwood’s cool thinking. And he also knew what he didn’t know. So he asked for help. And then he listened. And then he did it.
Harrison is a hero, no doubt about it. But in book, his most heroic actions took place directly between the headsets, where cool decision making and right actions always begin.
