Reports Show That Pilots Commit This Mistake Often

It seems that pilots often head to wrong airports.

According to a search by The Associated Press of government safety databases and media reports since the early 1990s, on at least 150 flights, involving one with a Southwest Airlines jet in Missouri and a jumbo cargo plane in Kansas, U.S. commercial air carriers have been landing at the wrong airport or have started landing at the wrong airport and have realized their mistake just in time.

The most common trouble spot is San Jose in California. Landing mistakes include six reports of pilots who were supposed to go to Mineta San Jose International Airport, but were already preparing to land at Moffett Field, a joint civilian-military airport, about 10 miles to the southeast.

A San Jose airport tower controller said in a November 2012 report, "This event occurs several times every winter in bad weather when we work on Runway 12." They were describing how an airliner was headed for Moffett when in fact it was being cleared to land at San Jose.

The plane was waved off in time thanks to a controller at a different facility who noticed the impending landing on radar and warned his colleagues with a telephone hotline that piped his voice directly into the San Jose tower's loudspeakers.

Some pilots say that they disregard the navigation equipment that showed their planes slightly off course because of information not matching what they were seeing out their windows.

Michael Barr, a former Air Force pilot who teaches aviation safety at the University of Southern California said, "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."

The tally doesn't include every event however, and many aren't disclosed to the media, especially that reports to the NASA database are voluntary.

The available accounts paint a picture of repeated close calls, especially in parts of the country where airports are situated close together with runways that are similarly angled, including Nashville and Smyrna in Tennessee, Tucson and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, and quite a few airports in South Florida.