"mitigating circumstances......"

Curious you would say this as you've already passed judgement in past posts.

True, I guess I'm trying to be nice.......

The FDR CVR will know.

There are a handful of posters who just can't help but defend completely this incident, and the Atlas incident before it. It is the same group defending the same utter lack of airmanship, which makes me ponder two ideas: either they are equally inept and are being defensive, or they perceive the comments by others as an attack on the US as a whole and are being defensive about that instead. There is a paranoid culture within the US which afflicts a great many, though I hasten to add not all, of its people in that any criticism of anything which happens to be American is taken as an attack on everything American, and so any kind of criticism is tantamount to a terror attack. I wonder if this bunker mentality is what is behind this defence of the indefensible, given that the very same individuals are only too pleased to condemn anyone from any other country?

aluminium shuffler

WHO is defending anything? the pilots screwed up and landed at the wrong airport.

IF there are sins in flying, this is one of them.

IT would appear though that a greater sin in flying is killing someone.


OUT of curiosity, would you rather:

a. land at the wrong airport, not kill anyone and have the plane reused the next day.

b. land at the right airport , kill passengers, and destroy the plane.

Are you saying that landing at the wrong airport, and stopping just short of a cliff through luck rather than judgement, is OK, and nothing more than a screwup? And are you also saying that any incident that is non-fatal is acceptable.

In direct answer to your incredibly stupid question, I'll give an answer that you were incapable of offering: I expect pilots to land at the correct airport without breaking things, including pax, unless there has been a mechanical failure or diversion that precipitates said incident. That is what professional, competent pilots do. So, of your choices, I'd take the option that doesn't cost lives, but since landing at the right airport is more likely to protect lives than landing at the wrong one, my third option is the better one. Pull your head out!

Everyone makes mistakes, and anyone who disagrees with that is a liar or incredibly inobservant of their own performance, but some errors are of such magnitude to be unforgivable. Mistaking airports in a modern, fully functioning jet is one of them.

Sorry, but that is just stupid. Not a great thing to post.

This discussion is running on many forums, and is split into two similar camps. One thing however, is that these two pilots were experienced and fully trained ATPL. They are not imbiciles. So, why????

There is a stronger set of circumstances underpinning any error like this, and the industry would do well to identify, expose, and then attempt to make right, in a transparemt way. We await the report, and assume it will be drawn up fairly, and hopefully, with some recommendations.

There's not one post in this thread defending this incident. What are you talking about?

I'm starting to see what this is really about for you. A little stereotyping and political anger there.

I don't think anyone was being nationalistic or paranoid until you came along and wrote this nonsense. In fact, the posts attacking these guys earlier that I was complaining about were from Americans (or so they say). I hope you're not making assumptions about where I'm from because I guarantee you'd be surprised. These are anonymous forums and a lot of people don't put their true location and nationality in their profiles. ;)

I actually find it quite disturbing that so many so called professional pilots are so quick to condemn their colleagues without a trial. Sure it's embarrassing when stuff like this happens but this witch hunt attitude won't help.

---no one said this but...the fact that no one was hurt and nothing seriously damaged makes an enormous difference. Call it luck after a screw up if you will but it still makes a difference. Not "OK" or "acceptable" but a difference. If it didn't we'd all have been hanged years ago.

It seems to me these forums are a place disgruntled and bitter old pilots go to try and get even with all those seemingly more successful people who've wronged them their whole lives....pathetic.

aluminum and maxred

BOTH of you have used the word stupid regarding my question.

Aluminum, you mention luck about avoiding the cliff.


FIRST I ask moderators to evaluate your post for possible removal (not banning though).


Second, Aluminum, how much luck was involved in not killing more people at San Francisco? Asiana basically hit the seawall or so close to it as to rip the gear off or destroy the gear. A seawall in my view is about the same as a cliff.

IF a UNITED AIRLINES (USA) 777 had crashed in the same way at KSFO as Asiana did, I would offer the identical criticism and so would every pilot here.

Contrary to your PIers Morgan like attitude, the nationality of the pilots does not matter. Airplanes don't care where you were born in order to fly them well, but the keyword is WELL.

Sehr interessant
 

This thread of late seems to be plagued by a deficit of listening. Of this, I mean that there simply is no actual - actual - actual disagreement between those who cite the lack of injuries or fatalities (true); the CLEARLY ERRONEOUS nature of a wrong airport landing (true); the need to understand precisely which slice of Swiss cheese the hole appeared in (or slices) (true); what the exact x-axis, y-axis co-ordinates are for the hole or holes (true); whether changes still spreading and reverberating through civil air transport (like Magenta line stuff) in their statistical central tendency will exacerbate the causes (once they are identified to an NTSB probable cause standard) (true); and those who advocate thought process expenditure on irrelevancies, redundancies, or repetitions. For example, were either of the pilots going commando (true), or wearing magenta-lined drawers (false)?

I was waiting for someone to start shouting nationalism, its the one constant of pprune. I would defend with the same vigor and counter with the same enthusiasm your airline if I was familiar with it had they landed at the wrong airport. Now put the international politics away.

Focus in on the event.

Who the hell is Piers Morgan? I thought we had got rid of this pillock to the USA many years ago. Is he actually still alive? I sincerley hope not.

nitpicker - I and many others agree with you sentiments. lifeafteraviation and bloggs (who seems to have caved) are seemingly on another planet.

lifeafteraviation - you have been asked your pedigree - on what basis are you preaching - what is your experience?

At least you seem to be coming round to the fact that this cannot just be "classed" as a simple mistake.

JW411

Sadly, I must report that Piers Morgan is alive and well working on CNN and often calling anything he disagrees with: INCREDIBLY STUPID.

IS this a reverse punishment lend lease? IF so please take him back and feed him to the corgis.

I know nothing of his "pedigree" but it really doesn't matter. I've always disliked determining credibility based on the number of type ratings one has. Judge what he says on the merits of the argument which I, a mid range airline guy (3 types if you must know) happen to agree with.

As you've indicated, you have made up you're mind, given that, it shouldn't make a difference what his background is.

West coast ... Simply following his lead...if you look back through the posts he judged and queried mine and others on their perceived legitimacy and not on their comments.

You agree with him that this was simply a mistake which by implication is forgivable, as opposed to negiligence which is not?

It has been stated many times the only reason people did not die was luck.

The majority of short, mid, long timers (ie pilots) agree that this was a huge screw up. The mystery has been taken out of it by the pilots admittering their error. I just can not see how their position is defendable yet he defends them.

This is getting silly - time, maybe, for the mods to lock the thread until a report comes out.

We are all agreed that the pilots screwed up - what we need to know is the sequence of factors which led to the mistake, there will be lessons to be learned in there.

One of the lessons I learnt early on, in my own little career (and thankfully well in time), was to be thorough in doing briefings.Whenever I neglected that aspect, I made mistakes.So even if I was not the one flying a particular sector, I would make sure that all aspects of the briefing had been covered.
Just my two cents.

WRONG. The formula that is used to come up with the TFP uses mileage and flight time, additionally it gives more TFP for longer legs than straight mileage would give. Also if we overfly the block by 5 minutes we start getting extra pay for every minute that we overfly.

Are you talking about me? :)

I'm not posting details on my background here...that would defeat the purpose of being anonymous. I don't preach. I don't discuss anything as an expert beyond my extensive experience and when I don't know, I will say so. Besides, we are arguing about subject matter that is not really so much technical as ethical.

I couldn't agree more.

Utrinque

Dunno about what back and forth you have going on with life after aviation, but his logic is sound. A mistake was made, lessons must be learned. I'm not going to put it in the terms you choose. The hang 'em high days are in the past.

What I'm not going to do is crucify the crew. I'm not going to crucify the airline. What I hope to do is learn from it.

A bit too much drama for me. Yes, it has been stated many times about luck. Repeating something many times only makes you the loudest voice in the crowd, it doesn't mean you're right. The max effort braking was the reason no one died, not luck.

It was luck that the max effort breaking was enough to stop them.

Rubbish.

No luck involved. The lenth of the runway is what gave them room to stop.

Lucky it was long enough. :O

Exactly! They had no idea how long the runway was! They were lucky it was longer enough to stop with max manual braking.... Why can people not understand the obvious... How ancient are you Geek!?

The runway was long enough to land a 737 without any problems or indeed without maximum braking. It was long enough to take off again later, albeit not heavily loaded because a failure at V1 would have been interesting.

If it was too short they would have almost certainly have noticed and not landed. Every pilot comes with a pair of Mk1 eyeballs.

There is absolutely no excuse for invoking luck, gods, devine intervention, good karma or any other such superstious flimflam. Superstition has no place at the pointy end of an aircraft.

Clearly very ancient! I think you must be the only one on here that thinks the airport was suitable for that aircraft! There is no valid landing performance data for landing a 73 there! Landing without any problems is not using max manual breaking! No one here is suggesting that the runway was NOT too short - are you seriously telling me that you believe their MK 1 eye ball told them at night, "yeah its a bit on the short side but I can tell by looking at it that if we stand on the brakes we will be fine"!! Any pilot realizing they were landing at the wrong field at any point up to unstowing the reversers would be going around! :ugh: Besides, the pilots have admitted not realising they had the wrong field until after touchdown ... so yes they were lucky!

I will agree with you on one point - that there is no place for luck at the pointy end but in this case there apparently was, and that luck was the difference between life and death.

There is no valid landing performance data for landing a 73 there!

Mr. Boeing disagrees with that statement. He does have in his library the Planning and Performance Manual for those who chooses not to use the airline specific ROTWs or Airport Specific Landing Data Pages.

There's no luck involved in anything. They had the length to land on or they would have gone off the end. They didn't go off the end, ergo they had sufficient runway to land.
Had they landed at the correct airport, then it would be luck they didn't go off the side, didn't have a fire, etc.

If you're going to include luck in the equation, then you need to factor in devine intervention as well.

It was certainly more "good luck" than "good judgement".

While it's true that the runway didn't supernaturally grow to accommodate them, their state of knowledge about the distance to the end of it was a divine mystery at the point they decided to land there. The fates' scissors stayed open this time. The piece of good judgement was in choosing to stop with all urgency once that mystery become apparent.

Careening off the side, or catching fire would have been as likely anywhere - that would have been very very bad luck indeed.

Call it what you like, fate, serendipity, who cares, but history shows us that very often the reason why the last few holes in the cheese did or didn't line up on a particular day is purely down to chance.

If AF4590 hadn't rolled over that 17" titanium strip on the CDG runway ...

If there hadn't been construction vehicles on that closed runway ...

etc

etc

Granted, you can't and shouldn't count on luck being on your side, but there are plenty of aviators still alive today because it was when they needed it even though they hadn't factored it into their pre-flight planning. :O

Lucky odds or chances are...
 

You guys need a course in semantics. Or maybe a dictionary. Luck means leaving the outcome to chance, in a situation in which one relinquishes all control over the outcome and - this is the misunderstood part- the determinants of outcomes. At the moment the main landing gear touched the concrete, there either was, or was not, sufficient linear distance til they went into the drink. That distance is inherently calculable, knowing all the pertinent variables. Duh stupid name call-out call-out, as it occurred, there was enough length to stop with Max braking. Really, I am shocked that you-all are trying to say "they were very fortunate" but it comes out as if it were best understood as a game of chance. They were fortunate it turned out the way it did, but it wasn't luck. What it is!! What it is, is the set of mechanical dynamics and plain old physics, and I'm guessing, their adherence to a myriad of proper aviating tasks such that their touchdown point was located close enough to the runway threshold on the approach side.

You prove my point for me...there was either enough linear distance to stop or not .. the question "is there enough distance?" was not considered at any point by the crew, it was therefore pure luck, chance, coincedence (whatever semantics you want to use) that there was enough distance. If they had indeed gone off the end no doubt people would be saying they were "unlucky" .

Check the dictionary again lucky=fortunate!

Really!? It has come to this sophomoric exchange between professionals? There are days I wonder why I still visit this forum. Can't we all just get along?

Pile it on, kiddies. If I've learned anything on this forum, its donning a thick skin. Feeling fortunate that I don't live in this neighborhood. Yeah, feeling lucky...:8

I haven't seen any discussion about how well this crew must have done in landing promptly on the approach end of the runway. If I recall correctly, Southwest is using HUDs in their aircraft. It would seem logical that this helped reduce the touchdown dispersion and contributed to the success of the landing.

Once they determined to land on that particular strip, they were fortunate that the runway was not 500 feet shorter, but then again, if it was, they may have recognized their mistake.

If I had not flown into a particular airport at night before, I think I would have absolutely confirmed the proper airport using appropriate navigation. There are too many of those darn things out there to just assume you have the right one in focus. This has to be mental complacency. Just the thing that SOPs are designed to prevent.

Fate is the hunter, waiting for such omissions to strike. You have all sorts of bells and whistles to make things safer, but if you fail to use them properly, you are back in that type of aviation that Ernest Gann wrote about where it all rides on the skill and determination of the guys flying. This time the hunter was denied its prey but the opportunity was there.

Hit the "Like" button on the above post:ok:

Machinbird - be careful using the word "fortunate" .. you will have people saying they were lucky next. Which is obviously an entirely different thing! :ugh:

regarding the HUD (heads up display).

I can't speak for southwest airlines. But with our HUD equipped planes the HUD is only used for CATll/CATlll ILS approaches.

I think everyone is overthinking everything about this mistake.

IF the runways in question had an ILS approach, this may not have happened.

Though, as I mentioned, older planes with older radios may have seen the back course displayed if the front course ILS had been set for Branson airport.

IF I sent everyone here to Times Square in New York with the assignment to find the following as quickly as possible, there would be mistakes made.

GO Find a Tall Blonde Woman wearing a blue dress, and her name is anna.

I'll bet someone would find the same with the name paula.

And don't ever overlook the effect of having a third person in the cockpit, someone who IS NOT a pilot. Pluses and Minuses to be sure.

Situational awareness went out the outflow valve on this one. They were way off the mark on all accounts.


Ranging from airport elevation to airport layout, clearly illustrated on the Jeppys and NOAs.

Chairman Hersman of the NTSB stated today that non-pertinent conversations with the jumpseater may have played a role in the approach and landing. This isn't gonna be good, you can take that to the bank.

glendalegoon said;
The SWA HGS has flight path vector information, which will show where you will touch down at the input gpa.

So your HUD won't show this? The SWA HGS also warns of an impending tailstrike, and offers windshear avoidance and TCAS RA information. It can be used for low vis takeoffs, or regular takeoffs.

It seems odd that yours is only used for lower than CATI approaches.