Oops! Pilots 'regularly' land at the wrong airport
US planes landed or started to land at the wrong airport at least 150 times in the past two decades, says an Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) report.
According to the NY Daily News, many pilots said they'd confused the runway lights of one airport with another while flying at night or in bad weather.
The Daily Telegraph reports that a particular trouble spot is San Jose, California, where the list of landing mistakes includes six reports of pilots preparing to land at Moffett Field, a joint civilian-military airport, when they had meant to go to Mineta San Jose International Airport, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) to the southeast.
Both airport are south of San Francisco in California's Silicon Valley.
Some pilots said they disregarded navigation equipment that showed their planes slightly off course because the information didn't match what they were seeing out of their windows - that is, a runway straight ahead.
Michael Barr, a former Air Force pilot who teaches aviation safety at the University of Southern California, told the Boston Globe: "You've got these runway lights, and you are looking at them, and they're saying: 'Come to me, come to me. I will let you land.' They're like the sirens of the ocean."
Most recently, a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 in Missouri stopped just short of a ravine at the end of a short runway in Hollister, when it meant to land on a runway twice as long at nearby Branson.
Also, an Atlas Air Boeing 747 freighter was due to fly from New York's John F Kennedy airport to the McConnell Air Force Base in November. But the plane got stuck after it mistakenly landed at the tiny Jabara Airport nearby in Wichita instead.
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