My flight simulator experience taught me that landing a big airplane is extremely more difficult than taking off, specially if unassisted by airport instrumentation.
While landing is harder, it is easily done with just a bit of practice in a flight simulator if the weather is fair when you are landing the real thing.
Landing is nowhere nearly as difficult as people make it out to be.
I do not have a pilots certificate, but I've flown real planes a lot in training situations. Granted, that was in a small single engine aircraft, and I've easily spent 100x as much time in simulators.
Thanks to flight simulators, I was able to fly the Cessna used in training alone all the way from engine start to engine stop, including taxiing, takeoff, cruise, 2-minute, 1-minute, and 30-second turns, landing hold pattern, and landing again on my very first time behind the controls. The instructor did not believe that flight simulation games could teach so much until I made that flight.
Instructors are not supposed to let newbie pilots do this, and he was ready at at the controls the entire time.
Anyway, landing is nowhere nearly as hard as people think.
But the question wasn't whether you can successfully land a small, single-engine land plane in VFR conditions after training for hundreds of hours on a simulator (though I am surprised and impressed that you were able to do this).
It was whether a successful takeoff is indicative of a good chance of a successful landing. Speaking strictly about small single-engine Cessnas--in which I have a (lapsed) private pilot's certificate--I'd say it isn't. Landing is, as the parent poster said, harder than takeoff.
I don't think any of this is relevant to the larger discussion, though. First, the pilot did have some certification, though it's unclear from the article in what. Second, neither my experience nor, it sounds, yours, gives me any insight at all into how hard it is to land a modern airliner. ;)
Sure, but we have no reports of a big airplane crashing near a runway that day, either, or evidence that it did. They either landed successfully out of sight and hid the plane, or crashed in some way that no debris was ever found.
Trying to land and failing spectacularly may be the most likely outcome, but it's also the only one we can conclusively rule out.
Landing any plane is more difficult than taking off.
Taking off is mainly a function of airspeed only. Landing is a delicate balance of: airspeed, rate-of-descent and the associated engine power, attitude of the aircraft, and 'eye'.
Landing is nowhere nearly as difficult as people make it out to be.
I do not have a pilots certificate, but I've flown real planes a lot in training situations. Granted, that was in a small single engine aircraft, and I've easily spent 100x as much time in simulators.
Thanks to flight simulators, I was able to fly the Cessna used in training alone all the way from engine start to engine stop, including taxiing, takeoff, cruise, 2-minute, 1-minute, and 30-second turns, landing hold pattern, and landing again on my very first time behind the controls. The instructor did not believe that flight simulation games could teach so much until I made that flight.
Instructors are not supposed to let newbie pilots do this, and he was ready at at the controls the entire time.
Anyway, landing is nowhere nearly as hard as people think.