[FartyMcFarter]

I had flight lessons, and after a few hours of training (most of which were unrelated to landing), I was able to land on a short runway, about 2000 feet long.

Landing on a long runway (10001 feet / 3048 meters [1]) as was done here is much easier, as long as the plane doesn't malfunction and visibility is good. So I'm not that surprised that some people would be able to do this given good instructions over the radio / phone. Especially so if the person doing it has witnessed landings from a cockpit before, which may have been the case here.

With such a long and wide runway, if you can direct the plane to fly over the runway and then cut off power, that should be enough to land the plane somewhat safely I would think.

[1] Runway 10L at https://skyvector.com/airport/PBI/Palm-Beach-International-A...

[pilot7378535]

Same, I'd hate to see a novice try to land on a narrow 2000' runway hemmed in by tall trees and a "snotty" 7+ kt crosswind component pushing the plane around.

Lucky they were in Florida with working radios and gas in the tank to reach an accommodating runway. None of that should detract from the emergency pilot's excellent handling of the situation though—bravo!

[edit] Apparently there was a significant crosswind:

  KPBI 101553Z 02011G17KT 10SM SCT042 SCT046 26/15

Even more impressive then!

[buildsjets]

Translation for the non-pilots:

The weather at Palm Beach International Airport on the 10’th at 15:53 GMT was: Winds, from the North-Northeast at 11 knots, gusting up to 17 knots. Visibility 10 statute miles. Clouds, some scattered ones at 4,200 and 4,600 feet above the airport ground level. Temperature 26 Celsius, dew point 15 Celsius.

METAR is pretty character efficient.

[FartyMcFarter]

Yes, to be clear I'm not saying that anyone would be able to do this, just keeping cool enough to do anything decent (including talking on the radio) was already a huge achievement.

My point was just that this is feasible a lot of the time with some good radio help .