How to make a pawn stay in place when you possess a different actor?

I think you are close.

When you want to un-Possess the ship you would need to detach the player character and update its position, I think there is Detach Actor from actor node and then SetActorTransform.

You could alternatively create a function to update the player character transform to a transform of one of the ship components and just run that on tick while you are possessing the ship.