mikewint
Captain
(CNN) -- A day after a Southwest Airlines jet with 124 passengers landed at the wrong airport, many are asking: How in the world could that happen?
"It's not common, but it's not unheard of," said pilot Mark Weiss, a 20-year veteran of commercial aviation who has frequently flown Boeing 737-700s, the same kind of aircraft that touched down Sunday at a small airport in Taney County, Missouri, about seven miles from where it was supposed to land at Branson Airport.
The plane stopped about 500 feet from the end of a runway at M. Graham Clark Downtown Airport, but no one was injured, said Chris Berndt, the Western Taney County Fire District fire chief and emergency management director.
"There are a lot of questions, and I suspect this is a matter of procedures not being followed, something along the long chain of everything you must do and constantly do as a pilot for safety," Weiss said.
But that's little consolation for passengers shaken by the experience.
"Really happy (the) pilot applied brakes the way he did," said passenger Scott Schieffer. "Who knows what would have happened?"
The airport's runway is 3,738 feet long, about half the length of the Branson Airport runway, which is 7,140 feet. That forced pilots to act fast and brake hard when the aircraft touched down.
If they had not, the plane could have overshot the end of the runway, tumbled down an embankment and onto U.S. Highway 65.
Air traffic controllers had cleared the jet to land at Branson and only learned of the mishap when the pilots radioed that they had landed at the wrong airport, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN. Branson is not equipped with radar, and Clark has no control tower.
Southwest said the flight's captain had worked for the airline for 14 years and the first officer had been with the company for 12. Both were on paid leave pending an investigation, it said
When the plane was still on the ground at Midway, the pilots would have looked at a paper flight plan on which the distance between their departing location and arriving location would have been written. That distance should have also been plugged into the cockpit computer.
"You match one thing to the other," he said. "Let's say there was 503 miles on the paper. The computer in the console should have matched that distance."
That's important if the pilots end up doing what is called an instrument landing -- essentially where they rely on their instruments to assure everything is as it should be. If the equipment was correct on the ground at Midway, the instrument reading during an instrument landing would have indicated to the pilots they were descending to the wrong location.
"It's not common, but it's not unheard of," said pilot Mark Weiss, a 20-year veteran of commercial aviation who has frequently flown Boeing 737-700s, the same kind of aircraft that touched down Sunday at a small airport in Taney County, Missouri, about seven miles from where it was supposed to land at Branson Airport.
The plane stopped about 500 feet from the end of a runway at M. Graham Clark Downtown Airport, but no one was injured, said Chris Berndt, the Western Taney County Fire District fire chief and emergency management director.
"There are a lot of questions, and I suspect this is a matter of procedures not being followed, something along the long chain of everything you must do and constantly do as a pilot for safety," Weiss said.
But that's little consolation for passengers shaken by the experience.
"Really happy (the) pilot applied brakes the way he did," said passenger Scott Schieffer. "Who knows what would have happened?"
The airport's runway is 3,738 feet long, about half the length of the Branson Airport runway, which is 7,140 feet. That forced pilots to act fast and brake hard when the aircraft touched down.
If they had not, the plane could have overshot the end of the runway, tumbled down an embankment and onto U.S. Highway 65.
Air traffic controllers had cleared the jet to land at Branson and only learned of the mishap when the pilots radioed that they had landed at the wrong airport, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN. Branson is not equipped with radar, and Clark has no control tower.
Southwest said the flight's captain had worked for the airline for 14 years and the first officer had been with the company for 12. Both were on paid leave pending an investigation, it said
When the plane was still on the ground at Midway, the pilots would have looked at a paper flight plan on which the distance between their departing location and arriving location would have been written. That distance should have also been plugged into the cockpit computer.
"You match one thing to the other," he said. "Let's say there was 503 miles on the paper. The computer in the console should have matched that distance."
That's important if the pilots end up doing what is called an instrument landing -- essentially where they rely on their instruments to assure everything is as it should be. If the equipment was correct on the ground at Midway, the instrument reading during an instrument landing would have indicated to the pilots they were descending to the wrong location.
