Tuesday, January 21, 2014
BRAKES!!!!
Within the last 5 years have had many mishaps where pilots happen to land at the wrong airport. Most recently, Southwest landed one of their 737s at the wrong airport in Missouri. The airport at which they were suppose to land was about 7 miles north. Unfortunately, this is not a uncommon mistake.
Another Incident that of a aircraft that landed at the wrong airport was when a C-17 landed on the wrong runway. Video Can be Found here.
Aircraft landing at the wrong airport can present many hazards and complications. One of the most dangerous and most obvious would be an aircraft landing on a much shorter runway than what is needed, which could cause the aircraft to overshoot the runway and potentially damage or destroy property or worst, possibly injured or kill people. If the aircraft were to stop in such a short distance Aircraft could be damaged and not able to fly out of airport.
Many reasons such as fatigue, disorientation, loss of situational awareness and simple human error, can account for these mistakes. I believe most of these cases are isolated incidents, although some research should be done to identify if there are any other causes to be dangerous mistakes.
Southwest management decided to suspend the pilots involved in the incident until the investigation has completed. I agree with the decision to suspend the pilots of the Southwest flight. This was an incident that should have not occurred. The Southwest jet was carrying 124 passengers. The pilot should be sent for additional training to ensure proper training in situational awareness. Although, I do not believe the pilots involved in the incident should be let go due to this mistake.
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Due to the increase of media attention these incidence are receiving and how frequent they seem to be happening I believe there should research into why they are happening. I also believe that most are probably associated with human error and more toward fatigue and loss of situational awareness.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to study the specifics of the incidents, in terms of how much sleep the pilots had prior to the trips, what time of day/night did the incidents occurred, etc.. to determine if fatigue was factor. If so, was the fatigue a direct cause of the situational awareness?
ReplyDeleteHumans are prone to error in many different situations. It is an interesting point that fatigue could have played a role in this incident. When pilots are tired, their ability to focus decreases resulting in a higher probability of error. The aviation community definitely needs to look into these occurrences to determine what similarities they all share so that we can prevent a major accident from happening in the future.
ReplyDeletepotentially, a simple requirement that says something like "pilots without at least X number of landings at a given airport are not allowed to fly visual approaches at night" could have prevented the problem.
ReplyDelete