You're fooling yourself if you think you can land that plane

Almost everyone has thought about it at least once. You're on a plane, minding your own business when suddenly and unexpectedly, an announcement comes over your entertainment system that the pilots have been incapacitated and they are urgently looking for someone to land the plane. Would you put your hand up for this heroic task? Surely, with the aid of modern instruments and the guidance of air traffic control, you could do it. How hard could it be?

Very hard, it turns out, as Guido Carim Junior and co-authors outlined in this recent article in The Conversation:

We’ve all heard stories of passengers who saved the day when the pilot became unresponsive. For instance, last year Darren Harrison managed to land a twin-engine aircraft in Florida – after the pilot passed out – with the guidance of an air traffic controller who also happened to be a flight instructor.

However, such incidents tend to take place in small, simple aircraft. Flying a much bigger and heavier commercial jet is a completely different game...

Both takeoff and landing are far too quick, technical and concentration-intensive for an untrained person to pull off. They also require a range of skills that are only gained through extensive training, such as understanding the information presented on different gauges, and being able to coordinate one’s hands and feet in a certain way.

If you think you can land a plane, you're not alone. As the authors note:

Survey results published in January indicate about one-third of adult Americans think they could safely land a passenger aircraft with air traffic control’s guidance. Among male respondents, the confidence level rose to nearly 50%.

What this demonstrates is the positivity bias, or the Dunning-Kruger effect (both related to what some psychologists call self-enhancement), where people overestimate their ability. This is also why 12 percent of men think that they could score a point off Serena Williams (see here). One interesting point is that men appear to be more susceptible to positivity bias than women (at least, based on these two examples), which probably reflects over-confidence (which men may be more likely to exhibit - see here, for example).

Positively bias is another example of how real-world decision-makers are not purely rational, but quasi-rational. A purely rational decision-maker would never be tricked into thinking that they could fly (or land) a plane without any prior training. In contrast, a quasi-rational decision-maker times that they are much better at activities than they really are. It's not all bad though. Without positivity bias, we wouldn't be able to enjoy some of the funniest (or cringiest) moments on reality television: