Planes Land at the Wrong Airport Often, Reports Show

Planes landing at the wrong airport seem like a huge oopsie, but it is more common that one would think. The Associated Press reports that at least 150 flights either landed at the wrong airport or started to land and realized their mistake in time according to government safety databases and media reports since the early 1990s.

One particular spot seems to cause a lot of confusion. San Jose, Calif. has tricked many pilots. There are six reports of pilots preparing to land at the joint civilian-military airport, Moffett Field, when they were trying to go to Mineta San Jose International Airport, about 10 miles to the southeast. Both airports are south of San Francisco.

"This event occurs several times every winter in bad weather when we work on Runway 12," a San Jose airport tower controller said in a November 2012 report after an incident in which an aircraft headed for Moffett when it was cleared for San Jose. Luckily that pilot got a warning from controllers and landed at the right airport.

In almost all of these incidents, the pilots were cleared to guide the planes based on sight and not on automatic controls. Many of the incidents occurred at night and pilots claimed they were confused due to seeing runway lights at the wrong airport. Some said they ignored the navigation equipment which said they were slightly off because the information didn't match what they were seeing with their own eyes.

"You've got these runway lights, and you are looking at them, and they're saying: 'Come to me, come to me. I will let you land.' They're like the sirens of the ocean," Michael Barr, a former Air Force pilot who teaches aviation safety at the University of Southern California told AP.

By looking at information from NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System and other federal agencies, the Associated Press found that there were 35 landings and 115 approaches or aborted landing attempts at the wrong airports over the past two decades. These numbers don't include those incidents that weren't reported and some reports, such as those from the Federal Aviation Administration, are not available to the public.

Some incidents made headlines in the media recently. A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 landed at the wrong airport in Missouri and an Atlas Air Boeing 747 freighter landed at the wrong Kansas airport.