www.buzzfeed.com/passantino/massive-plane-mistakenly-lands-at-a-tiny-kansas-airport-and
This reminds me of the A320 accidently landing at Ballykelly…
www.thirdamendment.com/wrongway.html
wilf_san
To all who have never misidentified an airfield. Don’t worry about being left out, you will get your opportunity. In this respect there are two types of pilot, those who have done it and those who are still to do it. Most people realise fairly early in the process that things are not what they should be and get away with minor embarrassment. However if you ignore the initial cues it becomes much more difficult to accept the later ones.
exmpa
given the flight in question (transporting 787 parts from around the world for final assembly at McConnell air force base) i would expect it is a regular and familiar route/approach for the flight crew so is evenmore of a surprise there was some confusion!
all of the reports i have found don’t indicate what was done (other than some calculations) to ensure the aircraft could take off.
the distance quoted (2.8km required) is at maximum weight, so i can assume the aircraft was emptied of any cargo and given mimimum levels of fuel thus vastly dropping its MAUW to permit it to safetly TO in the 1.9km available space
seems to be a bit of a mountain out of a molehill with regard to the runway length…pilot error in landing in the wrong place, i’ll give you that, news worthy, but not so much the short runway
Lots of possible reasons - even a very simple one of using one wrong letter in the airport coding when the flight plan is loaded in the FMS. Auto-tune for the ILS, runway in similar direction?
There was a well know case some years ago of ATC directing an aircraft to the wrong airport (Brussels/Frankfurt) as they had the destination & diversion airport mixed up in the flight plan.
Without knowing the full weight, it’s difficult to expand on the safety parameters. Even so, to land such an aircraft on a 6200 ft runway would be very, very sporty. Normal touchdown for any commercial aircraft would be about 1500-2000 ft into the available distance = comparatively short distance to brake. Not sure of the FAA rules, but for normal planning purposes in the EU, you have to add a Landing factor onto your distance calculations (as part of pre-flight planning) so that you have a margin of error built in. For example, if for your landing weight, the book calculation said 6000 ft required, you have to multiply that by 1.67 = 10000 ft in this case.
What was the fire cover at the small airport? Depending on several factors (pax - not in this case, overall size + fuel capacity), you would need a very high category, such as 6 or 7. This little place might have only been 1 or 2 = unable to cope with an aircraft of that size. Might have been very nasty if they had had a brake fire (short runway = lots of brake energy used).
Might not have been easy to reduce the load of the aircraft for the take-off - specialist equipment required. Also very difficult to defuel sometimes too.
I thought it might have been Easy Jet or Ryan Air, but no, they were far too close to named destination.