A Southwest 737 lands at wrong airport

Southwest flight 4013 landed at the wrong airport on Sunday, January 12th, 2014.  The high time captain and first officer said they had the airport in site after being told they were still 15 miles out by the Branson Airport controller.  They were cleared for a visual approach and proceeded to land at the much smaller M. Graham Clark-Taney County Airport.  The pilots appeared to be confused by the smaller airports runway lights and beacon mistaking it for the larger airport farther south.

So, now we have a big airplane at a little airport.  What do we do next?  First, we commend the pilots for stopping the Boeing 737-700 mid-size airliner on the pavement of that short of a runway.  The airport is listed as over 3,700 feet long but in reality, the landing distance available was considerably less.  If you notice in the video from the first link, you can see that runway 30 has a displaced threshold as does runway 12 that you don't see (google maps and zoom in).  So both pilots definitely deserve a job well done.

Next we have to ask the two high time pilots, why they weren't paying attention to and believing there navigation equipment?  The pilots told investigators they programmed the flight management system for Branson but didn't go there.  They should have also realized the heading was off by possibly 20 degrees, runway 12 at Taney County and runway 14 at Branson.  The pilots were looking for an airport in a small city, in the middle of nowhere, in the Ozark mountains and found one that seemed to fit so they landed.

Why did the pilots land at the wrong airport?  There were certainly cues, as stated above that should have tipped them off.  These are not fresh out of school pilots, no offense to anyone, we all start at zero time, but a captain with 16,000 hours and a first officer with 25,000 hours of flight time.  There may have been some perceptual blindness, they were looking for an airport in a small city in the mountains and they found one.  They did make mistakes that led to this event and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate and hopefully uncover for all of us to learn from.

Now Southwest has passengers to deal with that need to be transferred to the correct airport and the final leg of their trip still needs to be completed.  Busing becomes a priority because they certainly can't take off safely with the passengers on board.  Once the passengers and luggage have been safely transferred, the concern changes to getting an airplane out of a 3,700 foot airport that requires a minimum 3,000 foot takeoff roll when empty.  There is very little tolerance here for an aborted takeoff so the regulators will be heavily involved in the planning process for an incident like this.

Southwest management will have to work closely with the Federal Aviation Administration to determine if the 737-700 can takeoff safely.  This will become a planning and dispatching nightmare.  There will be waivers to fill out, insurance forms to update, minimal crew but excess regulatory personnel on board, optimal weather to wait for and the list goes on.  If not, the plane will have to be disassembled and trucked to a larger airport or back to Southwest maintenance and reassembled.

So, for management to suspend the pilots pending the investigation,  I would agree.  A mistake like this is very costly both economically and to the face of Southwest.  If they do nothing to the pilots, the seats will start to empty as the flying public's concern grows over the quality of pilots that Southwest hires.  Late night talk shows will make jokes and everyone will be made aware of the incident.  An airline of any size can not afford that kind of bad press so they must take action.  Southwest is honorably suspending the pilots at this time and not just firing them which says a lot about managements faith and equity they put into their flight staff.  This is certainly not an isolated incident though, there are other airplanes that land at wrong airports.  The significance here is the size of the airport and the fact they can't just create a new flight plan and release the aircraft.

Another similar incident occurred when a Boeing 747 Dreamlifter landed  at the wrong airport in Wichita, Kansas November 20, 2013.  Fortunately the very large airplane was able to get out successfully as you can see in the video.  This case everything worked out but again it is bad press for the aviation industry.  People quickly jump to the negative and focus on the fact that the airplane landed at the wrong airport and not the fact that it got out safely.