Correcting Wrong-Airport Landings
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), citing several recent cases of pilots who landed their aircraft at the wrong airports, is recommending changes intended to minimize airport confusion.
The NTSB said in early May that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) should amend its air traffic control (ATC) procedures to require controllers to “withhold landing clearance until the aircraft has passed all other airports that may be confused with the destination airport.”
A related recommendation called on the FAA to “modify the minimum safe altitude warning (MSAW) software to apply the MSAW parameters for the flight plan destination airport to touchdown, rather than automatically reassigning the flight to another airport based on an observed (and possibly incorrect) trajectory.”
As examples of the problem, the NTSB cited a Jan. 12, 2014, incident in which a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 landed at M. Graham Cl…
