Posted on 01/12/2014 11:20:27 PM PST by zipper
"...scheduled to fly to Dallas with a stop in Branson, Missouri (BKG) but instead, the aircraft touched down at Taney County Airport (PLK), 8.6 miles away from its intermediate stop"
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
It's willful negligence not to confirm the runway you're landing on in a big jet equipped with GPS. Too much is at stake!
“Wanna Get Away?”
Two decades ago....most all airline pilots were former Navy or AF pilots, and paid at a sufficient level for their work. I’ve come to note over the past decade that we’ve gone to the cheapest way possible of getting airline pilots. A guy gets his license and thinks ‘big’ on the job....then six weeks later begins to realize that he’s overworked, and lacks the depth of experience that used to exist as the norm.
We all want cheap travel now, and this is the result of that desire.
What do you mean by catastrophe?
If they are good they can land a 737 in as short as 3300 feet using 40 degrees flap, spoilers, and thrust reversers.
Santos Dumont Airport (IATA: SDU; Rio, Brazil) has a runway that is only 4341 ft. long. It receives 737s on a regular basis.
[ding!]
“You are now free to move about the workforce.”
Would you consider them "good" if they can't find the right airport?
If they drop all their passengers and cargo they can easily take off within about 3,000 feet.
I wasn’t talking about finding the right airport. Only about the landing.
From the article:
Only after unloading the plane, did Mr. Scheiffer notice the gravity of the situation, noting “we have all deplaned from @SouthwestAir 4013, and the mood is somber now that we realized we were 40 feet from the edge of a cliff.”
I am sure that the landing would not be considered flawless were the aircraft to travel just 40 feet more. It's so bad that they cannot safely take off. What are they going to do, to extend the runway or to cut the airplane into pieces?
That sounds great, except for one thing: airline travel is **much** safer now than it was twenty years ago. If you look at fatal accidents over the decades, prior to about the year 2000, US airlines saw about 1-2 "hull-loss" accidents involving mainline jet aircraft per year. Of course 2001 was a terrible year, with the 9/11 attacks and the American A-300 going down in New York a few months later.
But that A-300 went down over 12 years ago, and there has not been a *single* American hull-loss accident by a mainline air carrier since then - and there have only been 3 such accidents involving commuter airlines during that time, which is also a dramatic improvement over the 80s and 90s.
Yeah, these guys screwed up. It can still happen, and this could have been a catastrophe. But it wasn't, and catastrophes have become incredibly rare while airline travel has become incredibly safe.
“I’ve come to note over the past decade that we’ve gone to the cheapest way possible of getting airline pilots.”
Well, just be glad they aren’t hiring Koreans. I read a piece by a retired UAL Captain who went to work in Korea training for both KAL and later Asiana. He says that most of them can’t actually hand fly the aircraft. The Asiana crash at SF makes that crystal clear. I would never fly an Asian airline under any circumstances.
Like I said before they can empty the aircraft of passengers and cargo and it’ll take off safely.
They're saying they are going to be able to take off. No payload and light fuel, with a decent headwind, should make it reasonably safe.
I read that piece too. Kind of scary.
You're right about that, though the government reacted to the Colgan crash by upping the minimum hours requirement to 1,500 hours for airlines like Southwest. So now new pilots have to work for slave wages even longer to make it to the majors.
Chances are pretty good the pilot involved had 4,000 hours in type, at least. Southwest only has 737's, so it's not likely this was a crew unfamiliar with the aircraft. And they get lots of landings, since the range is limited. There was an available instrument approach to help identify they were landing at the right airport -- no excuses for them.
This seems to happen occasionally, wasn’t there a big cargo plane that accidently landed at a commuter airport a couple months back?
Yes, it was a Dreamlifter that landed at the wrong airport.
Actually US-born Asians with US-FAA airline transport pilot ratings have to go work in the middle east because they hardly get decent pilot jobs in U.S. airlines even if they were USAF graduates.
But the normal flap setting is 30 degrees, unless they know they are landing at a short runway.
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