Dad Can Only Sit in Sober Silence After Landing Plane with Throttle Stuck on Full
For a pilot landing with a broken linkage that stuck his small plane at full-throttle, landing safely must be an overwhelming sensation.
That’s even more true when there are three other people on the plane with you — and they’re your wife and children.
Video of the Sept. 1 ordeal, posted to YouTube on Oct. 6, begins as Devin Miller realizes he has a serious emergency.
Miller, a Canadian living in Texas, was flying out of Falcon Field in Peachtree, Georgia, according to the U.K. Sun, when the incident occurred.
Once he was at altitude, a pretty big problem developed: a throttle became stuck on full.
Miller first called the ground.
He was able to get a mechanic on the phone — but not before he had to tell ground control how many people he had on board, a standard procedure when a plane is in trouble because it’s used in rescue efforts, particularly if the plane crashes.
“Calling souls when it’s your fam… hits…” Miller says in a subtitle to the video, posted to his Family Pilot account.
Miller is shown preparing — quite calmly, it has to be noted — to land at Meridian Regional Airport in Mississippi.
Both he and his wife were able to maintain their composure without alerting their kids in the back seat, a pretty remarkable task when you consider how attuned little ones usually are to when their parents are stressing out.
The wife even had the state of mind to give them stuffed animals to play with.
The Canadian pilot would eventually call for emergency vehicles on the ground.
Meanwhile, a call with the mechanic confirmed things were pretty dire.
“I spoke with Ray [the mechanic],” Miller can be heard saying to ground control.
“I don’t think there’s going to be nothing we’re” going to be able to do, he said. “We’re going to have to prepare for a power-off landing.”
While all of this is going on, you can see one of Miller’s children playing with what appears to be an iPad in one of the back seats.
The final approach, however, seems to have gone off without a hitch, as Miller managed to get the plane down on the ground without any problems. After the plane is safely on the ground, you can see him and his wife celebrating and then sitting in relieved, sober silence, realizing what might have happened to them.
In the video’s end credits, Miller said that he (mostly) didn’t doubt he could get the plane down on the ground.
“I had the confidence (ish) right from the get go that I knew what to do and how to do it,” he said.
He also had plenty of plaudits to go around.
“[Air Traffic Control’s] amazing coordination, professionalism, and the people we met as a result make this learning experience one we took a lot from,” he wrote in the YouTube description.
“Grateful for our mechanic, the A&P at KMEI (AJ), and the Meridian staff who were wonderful to us. Chad G from Houston who flew out to pick us up without hesitation, and the entire United Flight Systems staff of [certified flight instructors] who prepared me well, and the owner Bobby D who flew me back to pickup the plane after AJ fixed it for us on his long weekend.”
He also recommended that pilots practice a situation like this with their certified flight instructor.
Given how this ended, that sounds like a pretty good endorsement for the idea.
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