The Percentage of Men Who Think They Can Land A Plane With Zero Training Is Staggering

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After seeing a short, non-instructional video, a quarter of people thought they could land a plane, research from the University of Waikato found.

The video was shown to 780 people and a retired Air New Zealand pilot told the researchers the video was “100 percent useless” for training purposes.

Co-author, PhD student Kayla Jordan, said these results demonstrate how easy it is for people to become overconfident in their skills with very little information or training.

Jordan said they intentionally picked an incredibly high stakes and highly skilled task like landing a plane to see if there was a limit to this.

“We thought landing a plane might be a barrier to overconfidence, but that wasn't the case,” Jordan said.

But this could possibly also be applied to people googling complex topics to understand, like the Covid-19 pandemic.

“These armchair epidemiologists during the pandemic astonished me - that people who aren't epidemiologists can look at data and confidently say ‘this is what we should do’.

I came across this article and intentionally thought, "This is madness. Surely people don't believe they can land a plane without training. Hell, you gotta go to school for 12 weeks to cut hair. The biggest thing that can go wrong during a haircut is that you either end up with an insane amount of lice that will make you wanna itch your head for the rest of time or someone ends up looking like a pumpkin pie haircutted freak..

So, I looked up the steps of how to land a plane from a few different sources, here's what it boils down to. 

The first requirement is that you have to balance the coordination of many things like speed, altitude, weather, runway conditions, and if you're drunk, and if you are, just how drunk. You also have to be able to talk to someone and do other things at the same time. Multitasking is pretty damn important when it comes to cruising in a plane alone prior to landing and in the landing process too, I guess. Here are the basic steps involved in landing a plane:

1. Approach: The pilot begins the landing process by positioning the plane on an approach path toward the runway. The pilot must take into account the wind direction and speed, as well as the speed you're going which I assume is pretty damn fast.

2. Flaps and landing gear: The pilot will then lower the landing gear and adjust the flaps to create more drag and slow down the plane hopefully you figured out where the tires button is because you don't wanna be sliding down the runway like you're 9 again and you're ruining your dads grass by leaving out a slip and slide for a few days. Cant do that. Fire city. I think they call them flaps. Usually, flaps mean labia majora but, in this instance, we are talking about the little wing-looking things. 

3. Final approach: The pilot continues to monitor the speed and altitude of the aircraft as it makes its final approach to the runway. The goal is to touch down on the runway at a safe speed and angle and not die.

4. Touchdown: Once the plane touches down, the pilot will gradually reduce the throttle and use the brakes to slow the plane down. The landing may be bumpy depending on the condition of the runway and the wind. I think this would be one of the scariest parts. Once you get closer to the ground, you realize just how fast you are going. That's gotta be insane.

5. Taxiing: Once the plane has come to a complete stop, the pilot will taxi the plane to the gate or parking area. Boring. I can do that in my sleep. 

Overall, now that I'm seeing the steps, there is no doubt in my mind that I could do this. No doubt. There are also a million youtube examples of non-pilots landing planes. If those dummies can do it, I can too. Simple as that. I can land a plane and I honestly might be equipped to be a fighter pilot after reading these articles. 

This guy did it. Why can't I?