Imagine you’re thousands of feet in the air, cruising along peacefully when, suddenly, the pilot slumps over. The controls are yours, and you’re staring down at a cockpit full of dials and switches you don’t understand. Your heart races. You’ve never flown a plane before, but every passenger’s life depends on you figuring it out. Could you do it? Could anyone? The answer is almost always no—but as rare as it is, there are a few extraordinary moments where the impossible has happened.

There are several stories of passengers successfully landing small, single-engine airplanes after something happened to the pilot. Max Sylvester, who pulled it off in 2019, was a student in the midst of his first lesson. Helen Collins—an 80-year-old in Wisconsin—did the same thing in 2012 but had some flight training. John Wildey had been in the Air Force, but not officially a pilot, before managing to land a plane in an emergency in 2013. The most dramatic incident might have been when Darren Harrison—with no flight experience whatsoever—managed to put a Cessna 208 down in Florida. Harrison was just on the way home from a fishing trip in the Bahamas when his plane’s sole pilot went “incoherent.”

All the above stories include tiny, single-engine Cessnas. First, these are the type of planes that could legally have a single pilot in the first place. But in the case of Harrison’s landing, it was also a plane that a certified instructor on the ground was familiar with. This helped immeasurably in coaching him through the landing.

No passenger has ever landed a jet airliner in an emergency. None have ever needed to, as these planes always have two or more pilots. But would such a thing even be possible? Experts are doubtful.

An airline pilot named Patrick Smith said, “The closest real-life example of this took place several years ago over Greece, when a flight attendant, who was also a student pilot, took over the controls of a 737 after the rest of the crew and passengers were incapacitated due to a pressurization failure. He was unable to do a thing; the plane ran out of fuel and crashed.” That flight was Helios Airways’ tragic Flight 522. With both engines on fire, the plane was likely too far gone for anyone to land even if it had had fuel.

Compared to a single-engine Cessna, a commercial airliner is a wildly complicated machine. Professional pilots must retrain even for slightly different models. Smith explained, “A non-pilot wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to even work the communications radios, let alone fly and land the jet.”

What about the softest possible pitch? The jet is lined up with the runway, landing gear down, on its final descent. Then something happened to the pilot. Smith said, “The odds are still very much against you, but the results would vary person to person and airplane to airplane…Where, exactly, is the plane from the runway in terms of altitude, distance, and speed? And how accurate are this person’s seat-of-the-pants interpretations of what the plane is doing? Much of it, too, would come down to luck.”

Retired United Airlines pilot and certified instructor Douglas Moss said some experience and talent controlling machines could help. “being able to quickly adapt to and understand the relationships between the plane’s flight control devices, such as the rudder and throttle controls, and their aerodynamic responses.”

CNN reports that half of the men surveyed think they could pull it off. The outlet poked some fun at the overconfidence inherent in this statistic. But I have to disagree.

I’m in no way suggesting men put themselves in situations they aren’t trained for. But emergencies do happen. Harrison wasn’t the only person on his pilot-less Cessna. But he was the one who leaped to the controls, corrected the dive, and then radioed for a flight instructor’s help. Against all odds, he figured out how to land. That requires a certain amount of swagger. And if Harrison didn’t have abundant confidence, no one on that plane would have lived to tell the tale.