Last Saturday, Australian Flying contributor Paul Reynolds found himself in the hot seat when pilot Derek Neville, 61, passed out at the controls of a Cherokee 180 over Forbes, NSW, leaving his passenger, 19-year-old Troy Jenkins, to take control of the plane. Jenkins was neither a pilot nor a student pilot.
Paul Reynolds was flying a Piper Pawnee on glider-towing duties for the Southern Cross Gliding Club out of Forbes, and had launched his first aircraft when his day changed dramatically.
This is Paul's account in his own words.
I was taxying back along the runway to hook up the next glider when someone over the radio just said "help, help!". Initially I thought it was a joke, but I took it seriously and said "station calling 'help, help' please identify yourself and your situation" and a fairly distressed voice replied "I'm a passenger in a light aircraft over Forbes and the pilot has just passed out."
My initial priority was just to try and locate him and offer any support that I could. I told the gliding club to call the emergency services and I lined-up and was airborne no more than four minutes after the guy had called.
I located him pretty quickly and established comms with him, and I think that was key to it all. I just kept talking to him; I asked him his name and I told him my name, so we established a rapport. I found out how much flying experience he had, and he'd actually been up in that aircraft about three time before and he had hand-flown it around the sky, and under supervision had made an attempt at a landing at Echuca some weeks before.
The young bloke sounded highly distressed in the beginning, but he started to calm down once he realised there was someone up there trying to help him.
I thought "this could turn out incredibly badly" but I was going to do everything I possibly could to make sure it had the best ending possible.
My main priority to make sure he could maintain control of the aircraft and get him back over the airfield and to circle the airfield so we could buy some time to try to work out what to do next.
I asked him what altitude he was at and he said roughly 1300 AMSL, which is only about 600 feet above the ground at Forbes, so I got him to climb, I talked him through that and I got him to maintain 2000 feet because that was a nice easy number for him to identify on the altimeter.
I told him straight-out that his sole priority and focus was to fly that aircraft and to forget about anything else. He seemed to respond to those instructions and I coached him through doing a big wide circuit to the north of the airfield and I located myself to the south, well away from him.
The glider that I had launched was still in the air and I asked him to land and there were also some hang gliders around that were also asked to get out of the air, so nothing could interfere with the young bloke simply flying around the airfield.
After I was confident he could fly the aircraft around the airfield, I told him very clearly that I was now going to talk to the area frequency because they would be able to help us out as well.
I was toeing a very fine line. I wanted to make it clear to him that everyone was now trying to help him, but at the same time I didn't want to overwhelm him by giving him the impression that this was pretty serious! I was trying to build a very calm rapport with him.
I changed to Melbourne 135.25 and talked to the girl there. She was very cool and calm and she immediately talked to other pilots in the area, and ultimately an ambulance helicopter was diverted to Forbes.
I told the ATC girl straight-out that I wasn't a flying instructor and didn't have formation training, and I thought it would be much better if we got a flying instructor to talk to this guy, and she went about trying to organise that. Eventually there was a Baron inbound with a flying instructor as well.
We had established that the aircraft had taken off with full fuel, so I knew we had at least three and maybe up to five hours to find a solution to this, so we didn't need to do anything urgently. The immediate reaction from the young guy was "I've got to come in and try to land this" and I persuaded him not to do that because we just needed to slow things down.
It was unfortunate for the pilot, but the bottom line was at this point in time no-one could do anything for the pilot. The young guy had to concentrate for his own sake on maintaining control of that aircraft. We may lose one, but God forbid we don't want to lose two.
I was prepared to talk the guy down to land it; I wouldn't have wanted to have done it, but I certainly would have done it. I felt there was someone more experienced than me who would have done a better job. We were fortunate that we never had to go down that path.
After about 35-40 minutes the pilot regained consciousness. That was good in a sense, but he'd just passed out for some unknown reason, and I wasn't going to fully trust him in flying the aircraft without establishing whether or not he knew what was going on.
I was incredibly relieved, but at the same time wasn't going to trust him absolutely because it still could have panned-out very badly. The guy had been unconscious for 35 minutes, and what was to tell that he wasn't going to fall unconscious again?
I was asking the pilot general questions like "Oh, you've had a bit of a nap, how are you feeling now?" and "What do you think you'll do now, what runway do you think you'll use, do you know about the crosswind?" That was all about trying to gauge his mental awareness. I was very concerned for about 30 seconds after he regained consciousness because he immediately took control and started flying to the south-west away from the airfield.
I could see that his altitude was getting lower and lower, and I thought he was going to literally fly it into the ground. It got to the point where I had to say to him "Look, the airfield is over your right shoulder behind you." That helped him with his orientation and he then turned toward the airfield.
He didn't want to waste time or muck around, he just wanted to go in for a landing. He seemed to then know what he was doing. I couldn't really do much anyway; he seemed intent on going in and trying to land it, and that's what he did.
We do have some footage of the landing from the ground, and it's not pretty. It was a safe landing, he landed on the main wheels, but about 20 metres short of the piano keys on the gravel and was way off to one side. I talked to the young guy the next morning and he said he'd had to intervene and manoeuvre the aircraft closer to the runway.
It was almost funny ... he then started taxying along the runway and apparently he saw the two fire engines and asked "why are there fire engines here, has someone had an accident?" He thought he'd been out for only about a minute!
Derek Neville was later taken to Orange Base Hospital for further checks.