PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Thomson 737 lands on taxiway at Paphos?
View Single Post
Old 22nd Sep 2011, 23:14
  #48 (permalink)  
Northbeach
 
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: North America
Age: 64
Posts: 364
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Nothing new............

There is nothing new under the sun. That which has been done is that which will be done.

Landing on the wrong runway, closed runway or some unauthorized piece of parallel concrete has happened many times in the past, continues to happen today and will happen again in the future.

The important lesson here is to understand why the crew landed on the wrong piece of concrete so that you and I are not the next crew to make the same mistake at that airport or anywhere else. "It's going to happen" just make sure it does not happen to you! Assigning derogatory adjectives to their airmanship, intelligence and performance may be personally satisfying on some level but does little to nothing in preventing such occurrences.

There is a reason that aviation regulations require landing crews to have the navigation facilities that are available tuned, identified an followed (if operational) and the training departments have all those policies, required briefings and callouts.

A quick look at Google Earth to evaluate the airport design should be obvious to anybody who flies for a living that this incident has happened at this airport before. I want to strive to understand what broke down in the process and why the failure occurred in order to decrease the probability my making the same error.

Some of the questions that need to be asked include; how long had this crew been on duty on the day of this incident, how many hours have they been on duty that week and month? What, if any, did scheduling practices and fatigue contribute to the underlying cause of this event? How many other incidents have occurred on this runway, what has the airport done to mitigate mistaken runway-taxiway identity at their facility? What navigation facilities are available for this runway, and were they operational? How about the approach lightening and runway markings, are they up to current regulatory requirements and all functioning correctly?

There is usually much more to the equation than "look at that dumb- son of a &@!!"; he/ she, they (demographic/region/particular airline) are terrible pilots.

This crew will face discipline, they will "pay" for their error. I am not advocating they get a pass for their error. That is a given; missing the runway will result in great pain for them. None of us put on the uniform on any given day thinking we will mistake a taxiway for a runway, land long and fast then depart the "prepared surface" or commit a gross navigational error on some long range flight. The truth is we, the pilots actually flying these fast moving anti-gravity machines not the "flight sim video game aces", operate in a high threat environment where things can go from routine to dangerous in a fraction of a second. When errors are committed many of those errors will be highly visible and scrutinized.

The Canadians have a safety publication with the following summary statement I have found accurate and worthwhile: learn from the errors of others, you will not live long enough to commit them all yourself.
Northbeach is offline