Two planes landing at the wrong airports recently caused a stir in the media, but it seems these were far from isolated incidents.
The Associated Press revealed that there have been over 150 such occurrences of pilots landing or attempting to land at wrong airports since the early 1990’s.
The AP collated the figures from the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System and media reports over the last two decades, which showed 35 actual landings and 115 landing attempts at wrong airports, which were safely aborted in time.
The US Federal Aviation Administration investigates all landings at wrong airports and many ‘near misses’ and as reporting to the NASA database is only voluntary, it is thought the frequency of incidents could actually be much higher.
Echoing the most recent incident of a Southwest Airlines flight touching down at a Missouri airport with a shorter runway than the airport where it was supposed to land seven miles away, the AP found that 23 of the 35 reported wrong landings were also at airports with shorter runways than the intended destination.
The reports found that recurring mistakes have been recorded at certain destinations where there are two airports sited close together and which often seem to be at similar angles from a plane’s approach.
These include Tucson and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, Nashville and Smyrna airports in Tennessee, and several airports in South Florida.
By TravelMole US editor Ray Montgomery
