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There is no Control Tower at the Peter Knight Airport. I found these comments at another website that explain that when the controllers handed the aircraft over to MacDill, the C-17 could have gone to VFR if the pilot stated he had a visual on the runway. At that point controllers would have stopped watching out for him.

A few other comments:
Landing at the wrong airport (or on the wrong runway) happens a bit more often than is publicized, especially when the runways of the airports involved are oriented in the same direction. Peter O. Knight’s runway is 4-22, which means that it’s oriented approximately in the directions of 040 and 220 degrees. MacDill’s runway is 5-23, and the actual headings of the runways actually differ by 11 degrees.
Knight airport has no control tower. According to the story at http://www2.tbo.com/news/news/2012/jul/20/18/huge-air-force-cargo-plane-lands-at-davis-islands–ar-437276/, they would have been under the control of Tampa Int’l Airport Approach Control until the aircraft reached the general vicinity of MacDill (the story said 10 miles), at which time Tampa would have handed them off to MacDill. Tampa likely would have been following the aircraft on radar til the handoff. They would have been operating on an instrument flight plan up til that point.
I would speculate that on being handed off to MacDill, the approach or local controller would have asked the pilot if he had the field in sight. If the pilot said “yes”, and traffic allowed, the controller would have the ability to cancel the aircraft’s instrument flight plan and clear the aircraft to land on visual flight rules from the point of handoff, thereby terminating any requirement to guide and monitor the aircraft on radar. The controllers would not have had any way to know that the pilot had identified the wrong airport until the aircraft was close to landing at Knight. Even on radar, the approach would probably have looked like any other normal approach because the approach path to MacDill would have taken the aircraft over Peter Knight anyway. And I seriously doubt that it would have occurred to any of the controllers to watch the aircraft to ensure it was landing at the wrong airport, and they’d have probably been busy with other traffic (I’m sure that will be part of the investigation).
The photo in the story shows the aircraft landing on Runway 22. MacDill is a few miles further to the southwest of Knight, so the pilot would have seen Knight first. Whether he made a mistake in landing there or he had a problem that warranted an immediate landing remains to be seen.
Both airports have over-water approaches to Knight’s Runway 22 and MacDill’s Runway 23. If the pilot hadn’t ever landed at MacDill before, it’s quite possible that the similarities in the approaches may have lulled the pilot into mistaking Knight for MacDill. As mentioned above, fatigue could have been a factor. However, the pilot and copilot are ultimately responsible for acquainting themselves with all aspects of their flight, including their departure and arrival airports.
Norris’ comment about a Flight Evaluation Board is right on target. The pilot and copilot will both be put through an investigative wringer, and it’s quite possible that a board might OK them for further flight duty after getting retraining. However, it’d obviously be a big black mark on their performance evals, and at the least their chances for promotion will be hurt badly.