‘Best Student Ever': How Air Controller Helped Man Save Plane After Pilot Passed Out

Darren Harrison, a 39-year-old Floridian with an interior design background, landed a plane with zero experience.
A Cessna Caravan similar to the aircraft Robert Morgan helped Darren Harrison safely land at Palm Beach International Airport.
A Cessna Caravan similar to the aircraft Robert Morgan helped Darren Harrison safely land at Palm Beach International Airport.
guenterguni via Getty Images

Robert Morgan — the air traffic controller and part-time flight instructor who helped a passenger with no flight experience safely land a plane after its pilot fell unconscious — is sharing details about the incident that emphasize its severity.

The passenger, later identified as Darren Harrison — a 39-year-old Floridian and vice president of an interior design company — was heading home after a fishing trip in the Bahamas on Tuesday afternoon when the pilot flying the private single-engine airplane he was on suddenly became “incapacitated” and “incoherent” due to a medical emergency.

After the pilot passed out, the plane went into a nosedive.

Morgan explained to NBC’s Kerry Sanders on “Today” on Thursday that it was no easy feat for Harrison to gain control of the plane.

“The pilot was slumped over on the controls, and they pushed him back, they get him out of his seat, and then they had to get on the controls and pull back the plane so that it would climb up out of the dive that it was in,” Morgan said.

Sanders explained that Harrison was at the back of the plane when it went out of control and had to climb over rows of seats to get into the cockpit. Sanders also reported that once Harrison pulled the Cessna Grand Caravan out of a nosedive, he realized that the plane’s headsets to call the tower for help were disconnected and had to figure out how to connect them.

After Morgan successfully instructed Harrison to take control of the plane and led him to Palm Beach International Airport for a landing, the plane disappeared from Morgan’s radar, he revealed.

“It must have been no more than 10 seconds. And I kept trying to talk to him,” Morgan recalled. He said he waited anxiously until he heard Harrison suddenly say the plane was “on the ground, what do you want me to do now?”

“And my heart just kind of sank, and I was thinking, ‘Thank God.’”

Morgan added that Harrison was his “best student ever.”

Although Harrison has yet to speak publicly about the incident, his family has offered details about the kind of man he is to the New York Post.

“I’m impressed … he was so calm, I’ve never known him to be that calm before,” his cousin Matthew, 37, told the Post — adding that Harrison’s wife is pregnant.

Harrison’s uncle, Glenn Harrison, had a different take on his nephew’s personality, however, and said Harrison knows how to keep it together during tense moments.

“I know he was probably scared to death, but it doesn’t surprise me, him doing what he did,” Glenn told The Post. “He’s pretty good about keeping his cool, it doesn’t surprise me he kept his composure, followed directions and everything turned out great.”

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