Seriously people, it isn't that hard

Was the tower closed? Wouldn't the tower probably kinda sorta, er, query the pilot as to why he was landing at an AFB?? Wouldn't the ILS freq be a flag? Wouldn't the runway number be a flag? I'm flummoxed.
 
I'd imagine even the captain of this flight would say it's inexcusable. Still will happen .000001% of the time.
 
MikeD said:
And surprised the worst one, ELP and BIF, hasn't been done.
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I was told when I first got to ELP that it has happened there. The story is that American touch-and-go'd one at BIF . . . after being told he was lined up for the wrong runway and arguing with the controller that he wasn't. And this was back when BIF was a SAC base!

Oh, well, as we used to say in the agency, "You can't fix stupid, but you can promote it."
 
Another one that's happened in San Diego Brown (KBDM) and Tijuana (MMTJ). I've been in there a few times - once with a guy who was aiming for Tijuana and over the top of Brown on downwind in the middle of the night. Very easy to do.

Nothing like pointing it out and having him mentally connect the dots (slowly in the middle of the night) then his eyes get really big.
 
I haven't read the factuals of it but, on the topic of visuals, a couple things I brief:

You're not to call the airport in sight unless we BOTH independently see the airport and are willing to risk our careers on it. I've had too many cocksure copilots call DTW in sight and I say, "point at the airport" "…that's Ypsilanti" far more often than you'd think.

"Report airport in sight" just means that "I'm tired of controlling you, take over responsibility for separation, wake turbulence avoidance and vectoring, AMMA hafta scratch my nether regions and I gotta step back from the scope for a second" :)

My rant is over, I'll check out the specifics of this event.
 
Derg said:
I haven't read the factuals of it but, on the topic of visuals, a couple things I brief:

You're not to call the airport in sight unless we BOTH independently see the airport and are willing to risk our careers on it. I've had too many cocksure copilots call DTW in sight and I say, "point at the airport" "…that's Ypsilanti" far more often than you'd think.

"Report airport in sight" just means that "I'm tired of controlling you, take over responsibility for separation, wake turbulence avoidance and vectoring, AMMA hafta scratch my nether regions and I gotta step back from the scope for a second" :)

My rant is over, I'll check out the specifics of this event.
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That was always in my first leg brief as a CA: "make sure we both have traffic and airports in sight before calling it."

Now as an FO, I hate when the CA is the PF and says, "if you've got it, go ahead and call it." I appreciate the trust, but half of the time I'm probably looking at a bunch of lights that lead up the entrance of a strip mall. I just wait until he can see it too.

My big pet peeve is the abrogation of wake turbulence avoidance when the controllers want you to call traffic in site. Been tossed around too many times behind a heavy.

In any case, I look at these incidents with a "there but for the grace of (insert deity) go I" and try to avoid the arrogant hubris that some people take.
 
mshunter said:
Been there, done that. Luckily, the sight picture wasn't matching up with the instruments, and we had read the 10-7 pages so it clicked we were lining up with the wrong place.

Be careful who you ostracize. You could be the next victim.
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Well, yeah, we all make mistakes, but the point is you caught it before it went critical because you were x-checking. That's kind of our job description as pilots. You've got to miss or ignore a lot of x-check items before you can actually get to the point of putting rubber on the wrong runway.
 
What happens a lot at some airports is they'll give you direct to the marker, clear you for the visual if you see it and wash their hands of any separation requirements, only to find yourself 3 miles behind much slower traffic.

Or my favorite for a few times after they closed DTW 22R was coming in from the east and doing the approach for 21L and visual approach traffic overshoots 22L and you've got a facebook of jet belly and no ones said a thing because… well… you're on a visual and he's tongue tied vectoring other traffic as you can hear the proximity alarm beeping during each transmission.
 
Derg said:
I haven't read the factuals of it but, on the topic of visuals, a couple things I brief:

You're not to call the airport in sight unless we BOTH independently see the airport and are willing to risk our careers on it. I've had too many cocksure copilots call DTW in sight and I say, "point at the airport" "…that's Ypsilanti" far more often than you'd think.

"Report airport in sight" just means that "I'm tired of controlling you, take over responsibility for separation, wake turbulence avoidance and vectoring, AMMA hafta scratch my nether regions and I gotta step back from the scope for a second" :)

My rant is over, I'll check out the specifics of this event.
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Similar, but a bit different in that for us, "field in sight" and "runway in sight" are two different calls. Field in sight just means the overall airport environment. Pending the crew agrees on that, runway in sight will also have to be confirmed, especially if parallels.
 
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