Got some 'Splaining To DO

[kham]

Incident: Southwest B737 at Hollister on Jan 12th 2014, landed on wrong airport Y'know you normally see this in Indonesia, or , Africa; NOT in freaking Missouri

The usual suspects doing the usual spinning, but fellas, COME ON - neither driver notice the goddamned approach heading was off like 20 degrees? Better dig out the number for that truck-driving school....

[BSink42]

That's the second time this month a plane in the US has landed at the wrong airport. I think the last one involved United airlines.

[DangerGirl]

Better dig out the number for that truck-driving school....

Yeah, because we need more of this.

[kham]

Nice to see the imbecilic retards are not confined to just the trucks (pair of clown cars sideswiping then almost wearing the abutment...)

Love the semi making a left turn and demolishing the stopsign on the left...

[Mynock]

Note that most of the bridge's victims are rental trucks, so no, most of those people never went to truck driving school. Welcome to America, where if you're breathing, over the age of 24 and have managed to acquire a drivers license (which is slightly harder than breathing) we'll happily give you access to a 25,500lb GVW vehicle and let you drive it no questions asked.
Seriously though, how the fuck do you land at the wrong airport?!?!?!

[kham]

So far AvHerald has no intelligible answers; they seem more into arguing and looking for reasons "it's not the pilot's fault" . Really? Who the frack was driving? Anyone looking out the front and seeing the big 12 instead of 14? And how its somewhat shorter than planned. And how there's nowhere near as many lights as there should be in the surrounding area? You can spin a lot, but it still comes up to epic fail. And it's sheer luck they stopped in time -- the mains on the piano keys? Yeah, ok...

[DangerGirl]

Aircraft landing at the wrong airport happens more often than you'd think, and it's always the pilot(s)'s fault. There's just no getting around that fact. You can't fly an instrument approach to the wrong airport, so it always boils down to a busted visual ID.

That being said, BBG is a towered airport, and the tower was open at the time of the incident, which means the 737 had to have been issued a landing clearance for BBG. So what was the local controller doing when he should have been watching for the plane? Not causal, IMO, but a little more vigilance on the part of the local controller may have prevented this.

[kham]

Oh, absolutely; the controllers should get smacked as well. I mean, when you go "Southwest 4013, clear to land..." and I presume get an reply, and then you get cricket sounds.... at some point you think someone would ask "Uh, SW 4013, say posit?" 'Course at that point, they might have had hands full hanging out everything including their shorts trying to stop.

[bbjohn]

It sounds to me like we have a bunch of airheads here...in more ways than one!

-Big Bad John

[nachtjaeger]

It took about fifteen seconds for the Tinfoil Hat crowd to start blaming some government conspiracy to alter GPS readings in order to. . . well, it probably has something to do with false flags, chemtrails, the Bilderbergs, the Society for Creative Anachronism, the Freemasons, and the Flat Earth Society.

Do commercial airliners even use GPS in their autopilots?

Note that most of the bridge's victims are rental trucks, so no, most of those people never went to truck driving school. Welcome to America, where if you're breathing, over the age of 24 and have managed to acquire a drivers license (which is slightly harder than breathing) we'll happily give you access to a 25,500lb GVW vehicle and let you drive it no questions asked.
Seriously though, how the fuck do you land at the wrong airport?!?!?!