It's not hard, if they had spent time around aircraft they provably had a rudimentary understanding of the controls. The dicey part is staying calm during the

It's not hard, if they had spent time around aircraft they provably had a rudimentary understanding of the controls. The dicey part is staying calm during the final stage of landing. You need to stay slow but not too slow and not panic and do something crazy as student pilots occasionally do early in training (going too fast, trying to force the plane to land but just porpoising down the runway, freezing, flaring too early and holding the flare, etc)