C17 Lands at wrong (3600 foot!) runway
 

Interesting situation here:

Air Force cargo plane lands at Davis Islands airport | TBO.com

Can't believe how quickly he brought it to a stop!

Craziest thing I've ever seen. C-17 lands at wrong airport. Not an airbase. #Tampa #MacDill #Screwedpilots

What on earth was the nav doi... ah! 2-person flight deck. That figures.

Good demo of short field capability though! ;)

-RP

"Good demo of short field capability though! "


That's what I was thinking.

I bet a few of the pilot's muscles tightened when he realized
how short the runway actually was !

Wanted: 95 feet of runway for military cargo plane parked on Davis Islands - Tampa Bay Times
""This is the second time this has happened," said spectator Gary Garrett, 71, who has a real estate office on Davis Islands.
"The last time, it was a 727 in the 80s," he recalled, "and they took that plane apart to get it out of here."

Photos here
Giant military cargo plane lands at small Tampa airport

OH....to have a copy of the CVR tape......that would make for some interesting listening.....particularly after they got it stopped and the magnitude of what they had just done to their careers sunk in!:E

You could come up with some great captions for the third photo in this set
(the Air force person talking to the civvy scratching his head or on the phone !)

Giant military cargo plane lands at small Tampa airport

Sorry but the phrase 'f*cking idiots' springs to mind......how? :ugh:

Willard
 

So I presume no navigator equipped aircraft has ever landed at the wrong airfield?!
BV;)

Classic marginal weather - 9999 and 1CU at 5,000 sucked them right in...

From the airnav website, in KTPF's 'Additional Comments' section:

:}

Now, about that pavement concession .....

They should be grateful that it wasn't an Antonov!

Now departed again! Follow the link in the first post to see an impressive short field PABTO take-off! I bet V1 came up really quickly and rotate seemed like an eternity!

There are some axminster-shuffles and interviews without coffee going on at McGuire.

They probably spent just enough time discussing it while parked on the runway with recorders running to overwrite the good stuff :E

I gotta give them credit though for the lessons learned and I bet they wont do it again if given the chance

A few decades ago, there were several occasions when inadvertent landings occurred at RAF Changi instead at Paya Lebar, the old civil airport in Singapore. Red faces not caused by tropic sun.

Surprised that no photos seen of the rubber on the runway...

The reports are saying there were 19 crewmembers! :ooh:

I thought the C-17 only needed two pilots and a loadmaster.

I wonder if fatigue at the end of a long flight caused a non-sterile cockpit environment.

I hope the pilots, especially the AC, have powerful sponsors.

I wonder what approach they flying. The ILS and TACAN approaches to Rwy 22 contain the note:

WARNING: Use extreme caution PETER O. KNIGHT arpt 4 NM NE of MACDILL AFB

I saw written somewhere in one of the articles that the C17 weighed
some huge amount (400,000 lbs ?) yet the airport runway was
only rated for a number way way less than this (20,000 lbs ?).
Hopefully not the media getting the numbers wrong.

With such a huge difference, how come no damage was done to the runway ?

Reason for asking is I once saw what happens when a C130 sinks through
the asphalt / tarmac on landing at an airstrip rated for Hercs but that had obviously not been checked in a while. Not sure what happened on take off
as never went back as it was in the middle of no where (Woomera Rocket Range).

Thanks.

Not one with me navigating.

McDill is on the South East corner of a peninsular and Peter O Knight is on the south east corner of peninsular. The GPS says you are on the centre line so it is easy to make the mistake.

A C17 bringing a bomb disposal team landed at Henderson field in the Solomon Islands. The parked the nose against the end of the ramp and shut down.
"Can we have a tug to push the aircraft back, please?"
"What tug?"

Washington would not allow them to pushback using reverse thrust so they had to wait three days until another C17 brought a tug all the way from Hawaii.

Whilst it was there it was the largest man made structure in the Solomons.