I think you take a left turn at Albuquerque.
FBI - Fly By Interstate
Wouldn’t the correct response be “The Hershey Highway”?
One of my favorite passages from Gann’s “Fate Is the Hunter” discusses early airline captains flying into Syracuse, NY…
The captains flying AM-21 … know that in spite of poor visibility it is quite safe to drop down as low as seven hundred feet and follow the eastbound railway tracks until they make a junction with a certain sharp twist in the canal. Then, banking away to the southwest as the hill of Syracuse looms darkly upon their left wing, they follow this mass until it melts away. Now they execute a one-minute left turn, reversing their course to the northwest. Continuing, they descend cautiously until the hill reappears once more on their left. They are now in a flat and narrow valley which leads directly to the end of the northeast runway.
Ya know, we spent (and still spend) billions on this GPS satellite network and provide it as a free service. Just saying.
And when the little device in your airplane quits working which means you know no other way nor ever practiced any other way to get down safely means you die. I rejected this happening to me. and now I am an old pilot. 
My favorite is the transcription of the pilot saying to the Branson tower “I assume I’m not at your airport?”
That’s when your glad you have the flying squirrel suit stowed.
ETA: Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeê
Unfortunately at some point in the flight the pilot must look out the window and land on a runway. Most of the time this system works.
Bawahahahaha
Never had a passenger come back & complain. Now if ghosts are real, a fellow who did that could be in a world of hurt.
I wish now that I had jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at least once but that was so against my nature to leave a plane I could get down that I never did it.
My sister got up to night 60 second delay water jumps in the early 70’s. I don’t recall what license she had. I seem to remember a “D” but…
She got her multi-sea and an ATR which I never did. The ATR was not my kind of flying but that sea & amphibian ticket I lusted after. Never had nuff $$$ or a job the boss would pay if I got it.
I had the A&P but I have flown more types.
And yes, we used to push each other into wasp nests. Bawahahahah
Even when in sight of the control tower and talking to him, it can pay big dividends to be looking outside just in case…
And what is really cool is for there to be a runway there.
he he he
For the pros here, at what point do you go from instrument navigation to visual? As I understand it, en route navigation is all by instruments (does anyone use VORs anymore, or is it all GPS?), you get handed off from one center controller to another, finally to the approach controller at your destination, and he gives you vectors onto the final approach.
So, at what point does the mistake happen? Does the approach controller not get you lined up with the runway, and when you look out the window you happen to spot the wrong airport?
It varies. Different countries have different rules. At the extreme end you are on instruments from take-off to landing and given that we need to be able to do that, flights are planned and terminal airspace is designed to make this possible. You take-off with the expectation that you can fly on instruments from the moment your wheels leave the ground to some point on short finals, sometimes 500 feet, sometimes 0 feet, depending on what approach is available at the destination.
To facilitate this there are a number of instrument departure procedures that join each runway to all of the various air routes departing an airfield and there are a number of terminal arrival procedures that terminate at each runway at the destination. SIDs and STARs respectively. Often the STAR will take you to about a 10 NM final position for the landing runway and from there you follow the ILS.
If it is a nice day you may be able to cut the STAR short by getting issued a visual approach, in which case you might be directed to a downwind or base position and from there you make your own way to the runway.
So as a general answer to your question, you’re probably navigating truly visually for the last 10 NM or so. That said you might spend the entire flight in visual conditions and be able to see where you are reference various landmarks, but you can’t hope to track an airway accurately using visual reference so you leave it to the flight management computer which uses VORs, DMEs, and GPS to keep you bang on track. It’s only once you are at low altitude, with the runway in sight, that you can track accurately enough visually to be able to leave the instruments behind. Even then you would still have the relevant navigation aids giving you useful information. If I was to break off a STAR to make my own way to a 4NM final, I would still have the ILS tuned as it is the most accurate navaid to the runway and is a good backup to visual tracking.
A quick look at Rapid City and it is easy to see how this happened.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57942579/Screenshot%202016-07-12%2020.42.43.png
Look how the orientation of the runways are very similar including the proximity to a main road.
I don’t know how this particular incident happened, but it could be as simple as (paraphrased):
“Approach, we see the runway”
“Ok, cleared the visual approach via left base”
The pilots look for an airfield and find one, the wrong one, they tell ATC they can see the runway, ATC assume they can see the correct runway and clear them for the approach. The pilots then mosey on down to a landing at an airforce base.
Ideally the crew would brief the proximity of the other airfield as part of their approach brief and would look for both airports and positively identify the correct one.
Thanks for the info. I’ve done a bit of flying so I know about traffic patterns, but I didn’t realize airline pilots followed a similar route (a much larger pattern, I would assume) or had so much discretion to plan their own approach when VFR.
Except:
- Ellsworth is not in Rapid City. It’s north of Box Elder.
- Interstate 90 is 4 lanes and SD Highway 44 is 2 lanes.
- Rapid City Regional Airport is quite a ways south of both Ellsworth and Box Elder.
- The terrain around both is quite different. Rapid City Regional is on the western edge of the Badlands and Ellsworth is mostly flat farming country.
Not all of those are things you can judge easily from the air, or are things you’d know to look for. Maybe the locals know that I-90 is 4 lanes and 44 is 2 lanes, but a pilot flying in for the first time won’t know that (and the map he’s using doesn’t show it).
You’re looking at things from a driver’s perspective.
- Box Elder is so small it can’t be mistaken for anything (I didn’t see it until you mentioned it.)
- They are both main roads, pilots aren’t in the habit of counting lanes from 10,000’ at 300 knots. They may not have even been aware of the road, but the roads adds to the same general look of the two airports.
- It is 7 NM south of Ellsworth, about 1.5 minutes at 250 knots.
- Again details that aren’t readily apparent in an airliner. They’re not something you look for particularly.
I’m not excusing what they did, just saying I can see how it happened. It’s a bit like turning up at a house a few doors down from the one you’re meant to be at. If you bothered to check the house number you’d see the mistake immediately, but if you see a house very similar to the one you’re looking for and don’t see the correct one, you could get it wrong.
It is not an unusual problem. The STARs for arrival in to Melbourne Australia have a caution note that essentially says, “Don’t land at Essendon, which is 5 NM away and aligned with Melbourne.” The big feature differences between Melbourne and Essendon are far greater than the differences between Ellsworth and Rapid City but enough people have mistaken them that they feel the need to add a warning to the charts and install an identifying strobe light to one of the runways.
Yeah a larger pattern. In the ARBEY STAR I linked to above you can see the RW27 arrival is basically a big wide circuit taking up about 25 track miles.
There are an infinite number of variations, but in general you’re not really planning anything yourself, you’re still doing what ATC tell you (“track via 5 mile final” for example), but you’re looking out the window in order to do it.
This LIZZI STAR terminates in a visual approach. The STAR gets you to right base then you fly the last 6 NM or so visually.
Some STARs just take you to a point from which ATC will vector you to the final approach course, but the Melbourne ones go all the way. Designed by lazy controllers and pilots I imagine.
Locally, in the early 90s we had a UA 757 land at Ribas Dominicci (SIG), our “Executive” Airport in San Juan Harbor, instead of at Muñoz Marín (SJU) our then-major-hub airport East of the city limits. United Flight Lands at Wrong Airport
SIG’s runway is a decent 5539ft/1688m so once they got over the embarassment and bused the passengers to their hotels it was not a huge problem lightening the plane and using the 757’s abundant thrust to take off towards SJU, though some people in the upper floors of the Condado Plaza must have been noisily surprised.
SIG is about 4 and a half miles WNW of SJU, and its runway on the usual heading is 9, as opposed to SJU’s 8 and 10. But I suppose just far enough that if you’re not familiar and you spot SIG first, you may not notice SJU on the other side of a cityful of highrise buildings – OTOH to someone who HAS landed there before the picture in daylight would be quite distinctive SIG SJU(Rwy8 approach) SJU(wide).
