NWA A319 Lands at Wrong Airport

[GVFlyer]

...It's bad karma, and if you choose to join in on the pilot bashing...

I's not pilot bashing - it's just a joke about a crew demonstrating outrageously bad judgement.

just don't get mad when it's you they are laughing at someday.

It comes with the turf...in nearly two years in the air the only damage I have incurred in an airplane is bullet holes, never the less my standard pilot brief is:

" Don't let me "screw" up. Don't hurt me. Don't get me fired."

If I screw the pooch, I expect that people will be talking about me.

GV

 

[320AV8R]

Got to watch those Northwest flights ending in "52". On 5 Sep 95 Northwest flight 52 enroute from Detroit to Frankfurt, Germany landed at Brussels, Belgium instead. The only ones surprized were the cockpit crew - the passengers and flight attendents were watching the whole event transpire on the AirShow.

Northwest has had their share of problems - remember the joke:

Question -

"How many Northwest pilots does it take to get a Boeing 727 from Fargo, SD to Minneappolis, MN?"

Answer -

" Three and a fifth."

GV

These situations are not unique to Northwest, as they have occured throughout the industry over the years. The important thing is to examine the mistakes made & correct them, so they won't happen again. That's harder to do than joke about it.


When future incidents occur, you can look forward to again being amused at the expense of others.

 

[CatYaaak]

When future incidents occur, you can look forward to again being amused at the expense of others.[/size][/font]

Okay, if you're skin's that thin (Airbus engineers work at sucking the fun out of flying, does flying one suck the sense of humor from it's "flight deck managers" too?), here's a deal for you complete with absolution; If I ever land at the wrong airport you can be amused at me. In fact, you can laugh riotously...free from guilt. If you read about it in the morning paper feel free to convulse and spasm with hilarity until coffee spurts out your nose onto your pancakes. I'll do my part for your benefit and hopefully you'll read how I marched straight-away into the CP's office, stood at attention, and gave a verbatim,over-emoted impression of that lamo Cougar-speech from Top Gun as I tossed my wings onto his desk.

And did someone say something about "bad karma"? What, is it also bad luck to have your photo taken just before going to fly...a la' Dawn Patrol.... too? Skyhooks accompanied by soft chanting keep us aloft? Electricity leaks out of open light sockets to give us cancer? Oops, I better shut up..I might be upsetting the Yin and Yang that keeps our world in balance.

 

[320AV8R]

Okay, if you're skin's that thin (Airbus engineers work at sucking the fun out of flying, does flying one suck the sense of humor from it's "flight deck managers" too?),

CatYaaak,

You may be surprised to learn that I am not thin-skinned, and I have a great sense of humor.

Alcoholism is a very destructive disease that affects millions of people, pilots included. The "good" thing about the FAR incident was that people that needed help got it.

As far as landing at the wrong airport....well it's happened in the past & will happen in the future. Hopefully we can learn something from this incident to help decrease the chances of it happening again.

I'm sure you are a skilled aviator, & the chances of this happening to you are slim. If it does, however, I'll pass on your offer to laugh my a$$ off at you.

320AV8R

 

[lurker]

Twa

http://www.co.moffat.co.us/Airport/default.htm#info

here's another one from a few years ago.

I'm not making any judgements though. I know under the wrong circumstances, any of us could probably make the same mistake.

 

[CatYaaak]

Okay, if you're skin's that thin (Airbus engineers work at sucking the fun out of flying, does flying one suck the sense of humor from it's "flight deck managers" too?),

CatYaaak,

You may be surprised to learn that I am not thin-skinned, and I have a great sense of humor.

Alcoholism is a very destructive disease that affects millions of people, pilots included. The "good" thing about the FAR incident was that people that needed help got it.

As far as landing at the wrong airport....well it's happened in the past & will happen in the future. Hopefully we can learn something from this incident to help decrease the chances of it happening again.

I'm sure you are a skilled aviator, & the chances of this happening to you are slim. If it does, however, I'll pass on your offer to laugh my a$$ off at you.

320AV8R

Sure the FAR incident was a "good thing", as in "It was a good thing the blissfully unknowing people in back of the aircraft didn't wind up in the bottom of a big, smokin' hole on the Minnesota prairie when the pilots lost their little game of Kamikaze Roulette and succeeded in turning their Boeing into a red-tailed lawn dart." That was a very good thing...lucky too.

But hey, if I finally "made it"...reached what I had thought was the ultimate goal of my career, and then one day looked around to find that my "dream job" meant being stuck schlepping around the Dakotas, RONing in a place like Fargo, I'd probably be drinking too. He11, if it were winter I'd do his 19 rum and cokes 5 better for an even two dozen. And after all, how hard can it be to find MSP from there?....just kinda aim for Chicago, set the watch alarm according to the ETE some sober dispatcher figured on flight plan, hit the AP, and instruct the lead F/A to wake me up only if she looks out the window and notices that the big blue thing that's normally, almost always on top when we fly is now on the bottom, and the big, flat white thing where the ant-people live is upside down above us. See? Even if I'm not a skilled aviator, I know how to delegate.

But I don't think there's much to learn from landing at the wrong airport....say, why don't we just call for what it is....."getting lost". They got lost and didn't even know it. Sure it'll happen again, but I don't think "learning" is involved, since we ALL know how to avoid this at this stage. It does, however, highlight and reinforce something about complacency that we already know well through experience or example. It'll bite you in the a$$!

If my a$$ were to ever be bitten, as we all could be by complaceny, I hope it's in a way like this, which means only an inconvenience for them and embarrasement for me, not funerals. Little things don't really matter when those are the possible results. And at some point there will come a day when you can look back at your seriously-hamstrung wreckage of a career and say "WTF, it's only rock and roll". Hey, if I could laugh, so can you.

Not that I'm planning on doing any of this you understand.

 

[Mugs]

Yak,

I hope your a$$ never gets bitten. I hope it's your fingers. Then maybe I won't have to suffer through one of your rambling posts again.

 

[TonyC]

Sure the FAR incident was a "good thing", as in ...

CatYaaak, you should be more careful when you read. You had me scrolling all over the place trying to find where someone said the FAR incident was a "good thing."

What 320AV8R said - - and you posted the quote - - was "The 'good' thing about the FAR incident was..." He did not say, or imply that the incident itself was good in any way. He said that there was one good outcome, and that is the people who needed help received help.

If you can't learn anything from the Ellsworth landing, fine. Be that way. I learned something. I learned that the next time I'm in the Ellsworth, Rapid City vicinity, I'll be more careful. And you know what, I've been there before, and I've made the same mistake - - sort of - - and I can STILL learn something from this event.

I was in a T-38 shooting practice approaches. We kept changing the TACAN radio from Ellsworth to Rapid City and back (or something like that, I can't remember the specifics today) and wound up beginning a TACAN approach into Ellsworth using the wrong TACAN. Switching control of the TACAN receiver from the front cockpit to the back cockpit and back added to the confusion. Anyway, without the attentive controllers who identified our mistake early in the approach and queried us, we could have wound up getting closer to the wrong airport or, worse, other traffic, than we intended. Can it happen to me? You bet it can.

But, if it can't happen to you, I guess you're right. There's no lesson to be learned.

 

[320AV8R]

Sure the FAR incident was a "good thing", as in "It was a good thing the blissfully unknowing people in back of the aircraft didn't wind up in the bottom of a big, smokin' hole on the Minnesota prairie when the pilots lost their little game of Kamikaze Roulette and succeeded in turning their Boeing into a red-tailed lawn dart." That was a very good thing...lucky too.

It was a good thing that the flight was operated without incident and that people got treatment.

But I don't think there's much to learn from landing at the wrong airport....

That will be determined once the NTSB, FAA, etc. disect the last portion of the flight and asign a probable cause.

 

[CatYaaak]

But, if it can't happen to you, I guess you're right. There's no lesson to be learned.

And I've been trying to figure out where I said "it can't happen to me". All I said was that if it does (the potential is there for anyone), feel free to be amused. If so, it's because I'm guilty of complacency, not for lack of nav equipment, charts, training, knowledge or being told umpteen gazillion times regarding it's dangers. And last time I checked or flew for one, air carriers weren't relying on single TACAN recievers to fly approaches or find airports. In terms of tools available to do so, T-38 vs. A-320, you're comparing not apples to oranges, but acorns to oak trees. A nicely-outfitted C-172 has more nav equip then a Talon.

Things like backing up approaches, never thinking of something as "garden variety" or a "milk run"....these are FUNDAMENTAL aspects and attitudes of even BASIC airmanship, and if anyone here hasn't heard/learned this from Day 1 then they've beeing living on Mars. One doesn't "un-learn" the dangers of complacency, they aren't ignorant at the time of getting bitten....they're guilty of it. If people weren't ever guilty, it wouldn't even be an issue. For that NW crew, given their equip and no doubt wealth of experience there really is no other answer. Human factors/distraction issues will be discussed and studied ad naseum..he11, some here will probably even blame management... but those are just variations on the same theme.

If the drunk-pilots FAR incident had ended up with fatalities, would we sit around saying "well, we learned from that"...implying that we didn't already know that this was dangerous? Of course not! Same thing with complacency except that, unlike flying drunk, it's insidious nature means that 100% of us risk of being guilty of it.

My suspicion is that if these guys weren't airline pilot-type, ALPA dues-paying bretheren and just some poor schmuck in a chartered Baron, there wouldn't be the usual "you weren't there" white washing, but a lot of "well, he should have backed up his approach" tut-tutting instead.

As far as the FAR pilots getting help for their personal problem, well I guess it's a "good thing" in a humanistic, I-got-over-my-personal-problem, Lifetime channel sort of way....but I see nothing good at all about them using the arena professioal piloting to do it where far too much harm can be inflicted. If someone wants to go to work drunk, far better to follow in the swerving footsteps of Ted Kennedy, become a Senator, and vote on legislation.