An Australian student pilot was forced to make a dramatic emergency landing after his Kiwi flight instructor passed out mid-flight.
On Saturday afternoon, Max Sylvester was just over an hour into his first flying lesson when he was forced to call air traffic control at Perth's Jandakot Airport.
In an audio recording of the call provided to ABC, Sylvester says his flight instructor - named by the media outlet as Kiwi Robert Mollard - had passed out and he was requiring assistance to land the Cessna aircraft.
"Do you know how to operate the airplane?" the air traffic control operator asks the student pilot.
"This is my first lesson," he says.
"[The instructor] is leaning over my shoulder, I am trying to keep him up but he keeps falling down - he hasn't woken up, I have just tried to lift his head back up to check to see how he is going, but he's not responding."
The operator asks if the instructor is communicating in any way.
"No, he is not," says Sylvester.
The pair work together to make sure the plane remains at the right altitude with the wings level.
Sylvester eventually is able to successfully land the plane at the airport - a feat praised by Chuck McElwee, the owner and operator of Air Australia International, which employs the pilot.
"This could have gone way, way bad," McElwee said, reports ABC.
"But everything worked out right, and it worked right, mostly because of the cooperation of the tower, the fact that he was a student — that he was dedicated and he knew what he was doing and he pulled it off — and that my flight instructor went up to the tower and they all worked together."
Mollard is reportedly in hospital in a stable condition.
Newshub.
