Not anymore. The Dreamliner has been plagued with electrical and structural issues. I assume the Dreamlifter is no different.
ETA: how do you do that arrow thing?
The 747 has been around for over 40 years. The Dreamlifter is just another version of it. I think most of the issues have been worked out.
The runways at Jabara and McConnell are almost in line, too. You only have to be out of position in 1 of the 3 dimensions, and not by all that much, either.
Some other similar incidents. FWIW, the restaurant at Ohio State’s airport (KOSU) was once called the 707 Lounge, after a time when a TWA crew only *thought *they were approaching the Columbus commercial airport (KCMH). Takeoff was no issue - for the replacement crew, that is.
The Dreamlifter is a substantial mod from the 747, with a lot of customized wiring done as a one-off. It may well have had issues with the installation, but those would have been ironed out long beforehand. The 787’s problems have been with design integration and production management.
Oh, whoops. Based on the name I assumed it was a cargo version of the 787.
The naming probably came from the fact that the Dreamlifter is used to transport parts and segments for the Dreamliner manufacturing process.
There is such a thing as a “short runway take off procedure”. I learned this in my single engine flight training. I would assume big jets have some similar procedure.
The short takeoff procedure in a Cessna is basically this:
- Get as close to the beginning of the runway as you can.
- Stand on the brakes while you bring the engine to full power.
- Release the brakes
- As soon as you reach the minimum take off velocity, pull back hard and climb at the minimum flying speed for the plane.
This works very well in a Cessna. You get off the ground MUCH faster.
J.
I’ll bet that Airbus is having fun with this.
IMO, it’s hardly Boeing’s fault a pilot landed at the wrong place.
The plane is owned by Boeing so I assumed it was operated by them as well, but the articles I find said that it’s operated by Atlas Air. So the pilot is probably their employee.
“In the old days” it happened and it was still puzzling.
E.g., in the 1960s, an airliner landed at Troutdale, OR airport east of PDX. More or less under the flight path, similar looking (but very different in scale) control towers. Panicked the PDX controllers since it just disappeared off the radar. Had to unload everyone and the cargo to take off again.
But with today’s navigation equipment, this is amazing. But there was that incident in SF recently where neither the pilot’s looking out the window or the landing tracking was good enough to prevent tragedy.
Note that the Dreamlifter pilots quickly realized they landed at the wrong place, but where they thought they had landed instead still wasn’t where they actually landed. Double fail.
alt, hold it & 24 on the 10key. ↑ 
Landing at the wrong runway
This isn’t really much to do with navigation equipment or anything like that. The vast majority of landings are flown visually. It may be just the last few hundred feet once you get below the cloud layer or it could be the final 10 miles and 3000 feet on a nice night after the approach controller has got you to a position where you can report the runway in sight. Once you’ve fully transitioned to landing visually you have pretty much switched your focus from all the great navigation equipment the aeroplane has to just what you can see outside and, particularly at night, it’s easy to make the picture you see in front of you match the picture you expected to see. If you had set yourself up with some inaccurate expectations then it’s possible to do something as silly as land at the wrong airport.
Although it happens very rarely, the risk is very real. At night all you have is lights to look at, and one set of runway lights can look very much like another. The problem can be compounded by various factors such as a cross wind on the approach that causes the aircraft to fly crabbed over the ground. Once you transition from instrument flying to visual flying you may find that the aeroplane is nicely lined up with a runway off to the side of the one you want to land at. Or the runway lights at the wrong runway being brighter and more defined than the lights at the right runway. The multitude of non-runway lights at a big airport can perversely make its runways less visible than the lonely runway at a smaller, less populated, airport.
Looking at google maps I see that the airfield they landed at was almost exactly lined up with the runway they were supposed to land at, only it would have been closer to them. That is a prime setup for this kind of incident.
As mentioned by another poster there are plenty of runways around the world that carry warnings about mis-identifying another similar runway. Melbourne International airport carries a note on all of its charts warning of another runway at a smaller airfield on the same heading as Melbourne’s main runway. Melbourne’s main runway has bright sequenced strobe lights that are intended to draw your attention to the correct runway. (Melbourne, Essendon)
An example of a “setup” of this kind is Sydney at night. Sydney has a strict curfew that means that 99% of aircraft are not permitted to land or take-off between 11pm and 6am. All of the runways are closed except for 34L for landing and 16R for take-off (the same strip of runway but take-offs are in the opposite direction to landings to try minimise noise north of the airport.) The only permitted operations are aeromedical flights and approved freighters. In addition, the runway that is open often has large sections closed for maintenance. So on any night a third to a half of the north or south end of the runway might be closed with a heap of bright flood lights on to provide light for the workers. The ILS is also normally closed during curfew for maintenance. The remarkable thing is that even though the other runways are closed their lights are left on, and when the runway you’re supposed to land on has its runway lights swamped by various flood lights, car headlights, etc, and the runway you’re not supposed to land on is sitting out on its own with all of its lighting clearly visible it is very easy to get yourself lined up on the wrong one. It’s only a small step from that situation to one where the wrong runway is at a different airport.
Edit: I don’t mean to make too many allowances for the crew. It shouldn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen often, but it is an inevitable consequence of being a fallible human. The best way to guard against doing this sort of thing yourself is not to say “it couldn’t happen to me,” but rather, “it could happen to me and these are the strategies I will use to ensure it does not.”
Aircraft take off performance
Take off performance in large multi-engined aircraft is a very precisely defined subject where nothing is left to chance. For an airliner to take-off from an airport the captain must satisfy themselves that they are able to either accelerate to a speed known as V1 and then stop on the remaining runway or accelerate to the same V1 speed, suffer an engine failure, continue the take-off roll, and climb away while remaining clear of all obstacles in the take-off area. There is no easy way for the captain to do these calculations personally so what happens is the airline has a performance department who do an analysis of every runway their aircraft are expected to take-off from. This will include all destinations and every likely alternate as well.
The take-off performance analysis is presented in a book on the flight deck*. Every runway will have several pages covering different scenarios such as beginning the take-off roll from different positions along the runway, wet or dry conditions, different amounts of headwind/tailwind, and so on. The crew will use the performance charts to determine the maximum weight they can take on that day, along with the V1 decision speed, what flap setting, and what power setting they can use. In this way the captain fulfils their obligation of ensuring they can take-off safely without having to spend a day and a half with their heads in the flight manual and studying topographical charts.
The problem is if you land somewhere and your airline has not published any performance charts for the runways then you quite simply can not take off. It doesn’t matter how long the runway is, you just can’t legally do it. So you have to get on the phone to your performance department and have them come up with some figures for you. That can easily take several hours and is likely what the airline spokeswoman meant when she said “The engineers have been running calculations all night”.
There isn’t really an equivalent procedure for an airliner. The closest you get is just using maximum power and setting it on the brakes. After the take-off roll has started every take-off uses the same technique. You commit to go at the decision speed (V1) and you rotate at the rotate speed (Vr). You use the same rotation technique every time as rotating the nose too quickly can lead to striking the aircraft tail on the ground, this is a bad thing.
What happens when you are checking your take-off performance from the charts is you normally see if you can take-off with your expected take-off weight at the lowest permitted power setting. Airliners rarely use full power for take-off. If you can’t, then you come up the table until you find a power/flap setting combination that allows you to take-off. The closer the runway and conditions are to your performance limit the further up the chart you will have to go toward the maximum take-off power setting. On a hot day at a short runway you may have to make decisions on whether to offload some passengers or take a few hundred kilos less fuel. In our company if we have a 200kg buffer between the weight we’ve calculated and our actual weight then we don’t need to set the power on the brakes, otherwise we do.
*It may be in an electronic format, such as on an iPad or as part of the aircraft flight management computer rather than a physical book but the concept is the same.
There is not 100% safety no perfect performance.
I was instructed to land at the wrong airport in Miami, FL under the direct control of ground, towers & app RADAR. A busy time, over worked controllers, T cells drifting hither & yon, an interesting 45 minutes one afternoon.
There have been a couple of airliners land on the drag strip that is directly East of TUL & in real close alignment to 8/26 runway.
Night just makes things harder.
I feel for the pilots that had this oops but you can’t their actual flying of the aircraft for they got in without messing anything up.
Also remember the mass ( weight ) as big iron does not recover as quick as a C-172.
Watched a video where two ships were going to collide and they knew it for 10 minutes but there was not enough time to prevent it.
Heavy mass is not so much steered as it is positioned. Ships, large aircraft & push boats with 15 acres of steel going down river…
Pilots are actually taught to make the best choice they can for an emergency landing & then not change their mind at the last minute because another seems better. The heavier & bigger the plane, the more important this becomes.
I do not know the spool up times on the lifters engines not the additional sink required before A positive rate of climb actually starts to occur but I bet it makes a 1953 Buick 6 cylinder 2 speed dynaflush look down right sporty…
Your flight experience may differ.
I have been turned into traffic by control towers and aimed at opposing traffic using the same runway form the other end.
I watched the live feed & was not too worried once I knew they were not loaded too heavy. But when the talking heads started talking about rain, I had some huh oh moments. Rain does not provide lift in any noticeable way. If their numbers & the length of runway they were dealing with were close, that rain could have been the straw.
As it worked out, they had room to spare as ling as nothing else went wrong.
I very definitely stayed awake during all this. bawahahaha
I meant to say that because aircraft take-off performance is all based on being able to continue the take-off after an engine has failed, the take-off should be a complete non-event with all engines operating.
Well, jeez, they could at least have tried a celebratory barrel roll!
“The Dreamlifter needs a runway 9,199 feet long to take off, reports affiliate KWCH. The Jabara runway is 6,101 feet.”
My question is how they come up with a precise figure like “9,199 feet” (not 9200? not 9198?) especially when it’s over 3000 feet off in reality. My guess is they take an average takeoff weight and put it into a formula and probably get 9200 but say 9199 to make it sound more precise, because people expect precision. Say 9200 and people will assume you’re rounding, even when you are. But that’s just my wild guess.
However, why was the figure so much different than the 6100 feet it actually took? I assume it took off empty, but would that make a 3000 feet difference?
I doubt it. Why would they do that? Far more likely they plugged numbers into a formula and came up with a precise figure and then reported the precise figure rather than rounding it.
Yes, it makes a big difference. Weight, temperature, and pressure all have a big impact on take-off distance required. Remember this is all a big media beat up. They need to make it sound exciting and dangerous. They do this by quoting an absolutely worse case figure for the maximum runway the aeroplane might need at max take-off weight and then comparing it to the much smaller number for the runway they need to take-off from. That way they can make it seem like the actual take-off is dangerous and risky when it is anything but. This increases their ratings.