It’s not unusual for the news media and the public to hyperventilate over an incident such as last November’s Atlas Air Boeing 747 Dreamlifter landing at the wrong airport in Wichita. But some pilots also were incredulous trying to understand how a crew of two professional pilots could screw up so royally.
Non-airline-pilot friends of mine were wondering why a giant airplane like this was on a visual approach. Many of them didn’t believe that we airline types ever fly visual approaches. I can’t speak for all professional pilots, but many of us do accept and fly visual approaches. In fact, I prefer them when flying into a familiar airport. It’s still a thrill to click off all the automation and simply fly using the seat of your pants and your eyeballs. Going from an 8,000-foot midfield downwind to a smooth landing in the touchdown zone is a great exercise in energy management for us jet pilots. And for controllers, the visual approach takes the burden of vectoring and clearing aircraft for an instrument approach off the table. It’s a win-win for both groups—most of the time.
At night, it’s easy to get trapped by a beautiful set of approach lights on display in front of you, especially in an area such as Wichita, where there are many runways running north and south in the vicinity. McConnell Air Force Base, Beech Factory Airport, and Col. James Jabara Airport all have north-south runways and are located within eight nautical miles of each other. Beech lies between Jabara and McConnell and the pilots initially thought they had landed there. After several exchanges with air traffic control, the pilots figured out where they were. After all, there were likely no charts on board the airplane that depict smaller airports, except perhaps a low-altitude en route chart. The nav database likely didn’t depict Jabara.
This brings up another point many pilots raise: With GPS and all the wizardry in the cockpit, how did these guys end up landing at the wrong airport? Doesn’t the airline have requirements to load the approach into the flight management system even when flying a visual approach?
The answer to the first question is pretty simple: No matter what’s set in the box, if you turn off all the automation and fly visually, you’re simply flying a 900,000-pound Piper Cub. All you need is a windshield, the seat of your pants, and occasional glances inside to check airspeeds for flap/gear deployment and target approach speed. There’s no alarm that will signal you are flying an approach to the wrong airport.
Most airlines do have a requirement for the crew to load an approach in the box to have a back-up display. But since the runways at McConnell and Jabara are the same alignment and Jabara is located on the extended final for McConnell, it probably appeared to the crew that the airplane was right on the magenta line depicted on the nav displays. Throw in a pretty set of approach lights on a dark night, not much cross-checking inside the cockpit by either pilot—and next thing you know, you’ve landed at the wrong airport.
If it sounds like I’m defending these pilots, I’ll admit that I am. It is easy to confuse airports at night. It’s easy to be lured by the siren song of a well-lit runway after a long day of flying. Throw in some fatigue as many cargo pilots experience, and the temptation is even stronger. I, too, have fallen for all the same lures that likely trapped these pilots. Thankfully, something triggered my brain or my copilot realized that something was amiss well before we dropped in on the wrong field.
Ironically, during the time that the Dreamlifter incident occurred, pilots were being vilified for spending too much time eyes-inside rather than flying visually. “Pilots relying too much on automation,” the headlines read. This is a perfect example of what can happen when pilots spend too much time eyes outside at night.
All of us, at some point in our careers, will do something dumb in an airplane. Some will be dumber than others. To err is human. To say “That’ll never happen to me!” is just an invitation for karma to show up someday and remind you to keep your ego in check.
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