Small Pilot

Pilot License

The airplane is the nearest thing to animate life that man has created. In the air a machine ceases indeed to be a mere piece of mechanism; it becomes animate and is capable not only of primary guidance and control, but actually of expressing a pilot's temperament.

— Sir Ross Smith, K.B.E., 'National Geographic Magazine,' March 1921.

There are many kinds of pilot licenses that you can receive. This book primarily deals with private pilot licenses and certifications. Pilot licenses are issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) They are divided into two categories:

certificates and training. A certificate defines the various levels of flying privileges that the pilot has earned. A rating defines the various categories and classes of aircraft in which the pilot may exercise the privileges of their certificate.

Certificates are:

Student pilot

Sport pilot

Recreational pilot

Private pilot

Commercial pilot

Airline transport pilot

Flight instructor

Ratings primarily refer to commercial pilots, airline transport pilots, flight  instructors, and private pilots. Some of the ratings that a pilot can receive are:

Airplane – single-engine land

Airplane – single-engine sea

Airplane – multi-engine land

Instrument

Glider

Rotorcraft or helicopter

Denney Kitfox (G-FOXC), built in 1991. Photographed by Adrian Pingstone in July 2005 at Kemble Airfield, Gloucestershire, England,

Sport Pilot Licenses

The exhilaration of flying is too keen, the pleasure too great, for it to be neglected as a sport.

— Orville Wright

Sport pilots fly smaller and lighter planes. The idea is to enable a pilot to fly a light, small plane for pleasure. To fly as a sport pilot, you have to get a sport pilot  license which consists of 20 hours of flight time, getting a medical examiner’s

certificate, and passing a knowledge test.

A sport pilot license allows you to fly for pleasure. It does not teach you how to fly into an air traffic control strip at a busy airport like Chicago O’Hara or New York’s La Guardia airport. Many private pilots flying around today though primarily fly planes as sport pilots do and hence do not need to have taken all the certifications and flight time which they do not use.

Sport pilots are not allowed to fly higher than 10,000 feet above sea level nor are they allowed to fly more than 2,000 feet above the ground level, whichever being higher. Sport pilots do not have to acquire the third-class medical examiner certificate.

Recreational Pilot License

The recreational pilot license was created in 1987. Unlike the sport license, the recreational pilot license has almost the same requirements as a private pilot license such as acquiring the third-class medical examiner certificate, yet with more limitations and not as many benefits. In fact, currently, there are a little over than a thousand recreational pilot licenses in use today.

A recreational pilot can not fly all the planes that a sport pilot can. A recreational pilot can fly only single-engine aircraft and helicopters, with a horsepower of 180 or less, and can only fly planes with four seaters or less. At the same time, a  recreational pilot can only have one passenger.

About the Author

Peter Bankss
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How possible would it be for a non-pilot to land an airliner? How about a small plane pilot?

Let's say some freak thing happened to both the pilot and co-pilot of a large airliner. How feasible is it that a passenger could land it?

And if one of the passengers happened to know how to fly a small single-engine plane, how feasible would it be in that case?

Thanks!
I probably should have been more specific than just saying "land". But you know what I mean. Get the plane on the ground well enough that the passengers walk away, or at least survive.

If it's a large airliner and the non-pilot passenger has help over the radio from the ground, yes, the passenger can land it. He doesn't need any piloting experience; he only needs the ability to follow instructions precisely.

Modern airliners are heavily automated and fly under computer control for most of the average flight. If both pilots are incapacitated but the aircraft itself is fine, then any reasonably intelligent person can land it with instructions. ATC are not pilots so they can't instruct, but they can usually find someone who is a pilot and can instruct via the radio in a pinch. Landing the aircraft with automation is just a matter of turning knobs and pushing buttons, so anyone who can do that, and who can do it exactly as he is told over the radio, can land the airplane.

(Note that this chance of success is predicated upon the availability of help from the ground. If nobody on the ground can provide instructions on how to set up the airplane to fly and land, then in all probability the aircraft will crash with a non-pilot at the controls. The systems are complex and it is difficult to guess how to make them work through intuition alone, and hand-flying is not an option … not even for someone with small airplane experience as a pilot, because the handling of large aircraft is quite different and there would be no time to practice.)

Anyway, ironically, if the airplane is a small private plane, then you generally need a real pilot. Small airplanes don't have computers or much in the way of automation, so their ability to fly by computer is very limited, and they cannot land under computer control. So the non-pilot passenger has to actually fly the airplane by hand, which is very difficult to do if you have no prior experience. For this reason, a small plane with a non-pilot at the controls is far more likely to crash than a larger airliner with a non-pilot at the controls.

For safety, in a large airliner, it might even be best to let the airplane fly to its destination, and then configure it to autoland. This is safer because it doesn't require touching any of the flight controls (yoke, rudder, throttles). If the final destination is an airport unequipped for autolands, the non-pilot might have to change the route in the computer, but this is delicate so it would not be done unless absolutely necessary. The best chance of success comes from having the non-pilot follow the simplest path, which means doing nothing that requires flight controls, and minimizing the number of buttons and knobs he must touch.

Pilots are not very happy to admit that this is possible, but modern airliners are so heavily automated that it is entirely possible for a non-pilot to "fly" the airplane just by giving instructions to the on-board computers. Eventually, airplanes will be able to fly entirely by themselves, with no pilots, but for economic and social reasons, that isn't being done today (even though the concept was proved feasible many years ago).

There are some people who have such a knack for flying that they are able to hand-fly an airplane reasonably well on the first try, with no experience. They are very rare, and it would be risky to hope that a non-pilot might be in this category. But as long as he sticks to the automation and there's someone on the ground to walk him through the procedures, he can land the airliner. If he's in a small Cessna, though, he might not make it, with or without help from the ground.

Crazy Pilots Taking off from Congo small road