I've landed a full motion A320 sim (old NATCO facility in Mpls) twice. First one was on the concrete but no awards, the 2nd one was as good as any I've seen ... but it was perfect weather conditions, no faults. In a real world situation, numerous things would have had to go very badly and very unexpectedly for a passenger to have to step in. You aren't going to step into a clean cockpit with perfect weather, already lined up on a 7 mile final. The **** will still be splattering off the fan all the way to touch down until you come to a full stop.
I've been on a commercial flight (a northwest a319?) that lost an engine on climbout. That was a non-event in terms of flight, but the whole airplane was shaking and vibrating until they managed to get the thing spun down. Also the backup hydraulic pump started kicking in (somewhere in the center fuselage below the floor) which makes an aweful sound ... normally you just hear it on the ground, so it was pretty disconcerting to hear it in the air. After they got everything settled down and checked off their list, we turned around and they brought us straight in (opposite the direction we took off, so landed with the wind and rolled out pretty long.) The airbus flight control system worked like a champ the whole time. There was zero yawing sensation when we lost the engine, just a big bang and vibration. My wife was literally crying, but I calmly told her this is the first and last thing a pilot trains for every day, and as long as we hadn't thrown a turbine blade through a hydraulic line, we'd probably be fine.
Also, there was already other company pilots on the plane riding to work, so I would have been pretty far down the list if they needed to invite someone from the cabin up front to help out.
Good old northwest airlines ... we got a $5 phone calling card for compensation for our trauma, they they threw us on a different airplane, and off we went again.
I was on a sun country 727 flight to DFW and we didn't get three greens for our landing gear on final, so they parked us in a holding pattern for 20 minutes. Finally the pilot came on and said "we didn't get 3 greens, we've run through all the check lists, we have everything we need to try to land." That worked out fine, but another time I didn't get invited to the cockpit to help out. The landed us way on the NW corner runway at DFW and we stopped in place. Pickup trucks came up after a while and parked a *long* way off ... which made me wonder how bad we were smoking. Eventually someone came out, declared the gear safe to taxi and we finally got to go to a gate and get off the plane.
If it wasn't for landing gear and engines, airplanes would be way more reliable!
