Pilot and copilot placed on paid leave pending investigation: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/13/travel/southwest-plane-wrong-airport/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
Well, they took off ok mid-Monday afternoon (video in page) – searching it I see the minimum takeoff run for a no-pax no-freight 737-700 quoted as about just how much they used to land in the first place.
“I guess he wasn’t on the right vector, Victor.”
Don’t you start up with that White Zone shit.
That’s fallacious reasoning. You’re assuming that burning to death is worse than being trapped on a tarmac with people that want to go to Branson, Missouri.
Can someone post a link? I’ve looked at several news sources and can’t find this control tower audio.
Just curious, this CNN article states that Branson Airport does not have radar. Were you paraphrasing when you said radar? I’m not challenging your quote; just trying to understand the flow of events.
If Branson Airport had radar, I would think that air traffic control would object when the pilot requested to land, but was not showing up on radar.
However, if Branson Airport does not have radar it is all pretty straight-forward: The pilots see Graham Clark Downtown Airport, radio to Branson Airport to request to land, air traffic control doesn’t know where the plane is at so it gives the ok. Graham Clark Downtown Airport doesn’t have a tower and doesn’t have a chance to object. The pilots do a visual landing so they don’t realize they made a mistake until they radio to Branson Airport and the tower there says “I don’t see you on the runway”.
To reduce the plane’s weight enough for it to do the short take-off, they had to pump the plane full of helium. Indeed, they needed to maximize the amount of helium to get the job done, so they pumped the passenger and baggage compartments full of liquid helium. The aircraft was then able to do a vertical take-off. As the helium evaporated, the plane slowly settled down, thus doing a vertical landing as well – by which time, they managed to float it over to the correct airport.
holy moly!!! he didn’t know he landed at the wrong airport. WOW!
And very expensive requiring replacement before taking off. Cheaper to serve a round of drinks and wait for someone to dust off an old mobile stair cart. Do theses things have license plates?
checked the pictures, it was a non-motorized set of stairs. They would have had to put it on the back of a truck or flatbed.
They would probably have a radar feed from SGF (Springfield). Not sure who is doing the approach control but that isn’t necessarily the airport the plane is landing at.
There is only one ILS at Branson and it is not for the runway they would have been using, so the approach would’ve been a pure visual with no instrument indication that they weren’t lined up on the correct runway. Both aerodromes have GPS approaches but you’d tend not to use them unless you really have to as they add several minutes to your flight time.
I was under the impression, and I’ll have to ask around, that Southwest has been requesting GPS approaches at the airports they fly to as it’s supposed to save them fuel. I do know that a lot more GPS and RNPs approaches are created then any other type.
It has been a few years since I’ve worked in the IAP section of charting, but I’m surprised that there’s been no talk of this around the office. When the last plane landed at the wrong airport everyone was pulling charts and wondering what went wrong.
And make sure there were no low bridges along the way.
They do on Arrested Development. You will get hop ons.
When you say the slides are expensive, I recall reading they are in the $20,000 range. Is that correct?
Well they are cheap to make because they don’t require any installation so they are a popular choice for new approaches. They can be more efficient than other instrument approaches because they aren’t bound by having a physical navaid on the ground, so you have fewer constraints on how you design the tracking. That doesn’t make them the most efficient approach compared to a visual approach though.
Any instrument approach will typically track via at least a 10NM final for the runway. For a runway that is already aligned with your inbound track, that doesn’t matter, it won’t cost you time or fuel to fly the approach or to at least have it as a back up to a visual approach. But for a runway that is the reciprocal to your inbound track you are adding at least 20 NM to your track miles and several hundred kg of fuel to your burn. If you can, it is far more efficient to just join the circuit on a downwind the way light aircraft do. If you do that though, you won’t get as much situational awareness help from your instruments, not that you should need it.
And to be fair, they did land at the airport that is closer to the town of Branson.
And the airport they wanted to be at is quite simple… runway and building.
perhaps they should use lights to display a code for runway length. A single letter would do .
Actually they should have lights to display the big X as in “Do not use ! Do NOT approach”
and they turn it off when there is clearance to land given … the other end has a light to say “do not land from this direction” still…
There could be two categories one X, except in emergencies . two X’s. NEVER ( the runway is simply unusable. eg damaged, has equipment on it… etc )
That wouldn’t work at uncontrolled airports like this one. Nobody gives clearance to land.
considering most commercial aircraft have equipment that will deliver them to within 10 cm of where they want to land I’m not seeing the need to reinvent any wheels.
Attention employees: use all the little dialee things in the cockpit that you’re suppose to use. That is all.