Posted on 01/11/2007 5:22:18 PM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
The crew of an Airbus plane with 39 passengers on board landed at the wrong airport, an accident report revealed today.
The Dublin-based Eirjet flight, being operated on behalf of Ryanair, should have touched down at Derry, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said.
But the Airbus A320, flying from Liverpool, landed at Ballykelly airfield, an ex-RAF base now used by the British Army, about five miles from Derry Airport.
The AAIB report said air traffic controllers (ATC) had been told by the Airbus A320 aircraft crew: "We've just touched down." ATC replied: "It was the wrong airport, you've landed at Ballykelly."
The A320 crew replied: "I know we have." The passengers and bags were unloaded and taken by road to Londonderry.
Another crew then flew the plane out of Ballykelly. The report said the crew of the A320 had had problems with their instrument landing system and asked for permission to make a visual landing at Derry on the day of the incident - March 29 last year.
The report added that the 59-year-old captain said that once he saw Ballykelly, and not knowing there was another airfield in the vicinity, "his mind-set was that this must be his destination airfield".
The AAIB said that, before the flight, the captain had tried in vain to obtain a copy of the Derry airfield charts. He got them a day after the incident and said that, had he seen them previously, he would have been fully aware of the existence of Ballykelly and would not have landed there.
The report said the co-pilot was not aware of the existence of Ballykelly and stated that he, too, had the same mind-set as the captain.
They got to use the plane again. That qualifies it as a great landing.
That happened in Corpus Christi back in 1998 when a Continental 737 landed at an old naval air base a few miles away from Corpus Christi International Airport (CRP) on a runway with the same heading as the main runway at CRP.
If you want on or off my aerospace ping list, please contact me by Freep mail.
Yup, like that little airfield in Marlboro Mass. it's 30' long and 1/3 mile wide! That's a pain to land on.
Show me the way to go home......ping.
How is Corpus' airport? I will always remember "Brownsville International", a cinder block building on a short runway.
Short, but very, very wide...
Did you hear the on about the Irish airline pilot?
Meanwhile, the Eirjet.com site currently says this:
"EIRJET regret to inform you that we have ceased operations with immediate effect."
I'm tired and I want to go to bed...
I think it was a Delta flight that landed at MacDill when it wanted Tampa International in the early 80s.
Some friends of mine at work were flying home from a Bay Area trip on business. The pilot, one of my fellow workers, was flying for the first time into the Lincoln Airport, a small northern California airport.
As he began his glide into the runway, he was kind of confused and wondering why the runway number was not what he expected. He also noticed that the runway was really, really long.
When the plane landed, Humvees came skidding to a stop around him and the five guys got out to the admonition of a bunch of Security police.
They had just landed at Beale AFB, home of the highly secret Global Hawk and SR-71s.
As I understand it, he got in a lot of trouble over that.
Short, but very, very wide...>>>>
150 feet long and 3 miles wide?
Bump for later.
Something quite like that...
Years ago, I dated a stewardess. (Yeah, it was back when they called themselves that!) She told me that Continental was going to merge with Aer Lingus. She then told me what the new name was going to be.
They just opened a new terminal built on the site of the original terminal back in 2002. The original terminal was built in the early 1950's back before there were passenger jets. It had a rather spread out inefficient layout, and had to be retrofitted for security and baggage pick up. I remember back in the mid 1960's that it was possible to bypass the terminal and walk directly out to the gates where there was just a half height hurricane fence preventing access to the tarmac along the walkway from the terminal to the gates. Later that got completely enclosed with glass walls on both sides.
About ten years or so ago, the city had started renovating the existing terminal and found serious structural problems that would be expensive to fix. The city council got some proposals for building a new terminal that would be more modern but would cost a little more than fixing the existing terminal, but it would also last longer. Originally they planned to put the terminal in a new location between the runways, but decided to build it on the site of the orginal terminal when the costs of moving the entrance and utilities were estimated to be $6-10 million.
The new terminal is much more compact and requires much less walking from the check in counters to the gates. The Southwest gate used to be over 1,000 feet from the check in counter. Now it is the closest gate to the TSA "security" checkpoint. All the gates are located near each other on the second floor of the terminal, and they all have jetways leading to the planes. The previous terminal only had a jetway for Southwest, and it had a rather steep slope as it went from ground level up to the plane.
The lines to go through TSA screening are much shorter than at SAT, IAH, or DFW. My parents went on a trip to Europe last September, and they were able to go through security much more quickly than the other people in their group who started at IAH.
Here is the layout of the old terminal with temporary facilities.The layout of the new terminal.
Captain Corrigan - is that you?
In England at the height of WW2 there was an airfield every ten miles! Don't tell me this kind of thing didn't happen then, and in spades!
I heard a similar story about Ellsworth AFB when a commercial flight landed there instead of at Rapid City.
I knew a guy who landed on the WRONG CARRIER in WWII.....
I guess S4!t happens......
(They brought it below refueled it and every body
within ear shot autographed the aircraft with a
sundry array of writing materials)
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