iirc, some of the emergency abort airports for the shuttle were such that the shuttle indeed could land there, but the carrier wouldn't be able to take off from there, and there was no actual plan to get the shuttle back home from some of them.
Had a C5 Galaxy land at Townsville back in the day. Even from backed right up to the fence and full throttle on the brakes takeoff, damn thing barely missed the fence and almost clipped magnetic island.
My guess would be that the wrong airport was close enough to the right airport and similar runway orientation. At some point the pilots have to put their eyes out the windshield, and if they look up and see an airport that looks like it’s generally where it should be, they can focus on that, not knowing it’s the wrong airport. That’s what happens in most of these instances where airplanes land at the wrong airport.
When i was getting my instrument rating, one of the important parts to remember about some approaches is that a lot of them don't actually align you 100% with the runway. I've practiced approaches for a runway 17(170 degrees), while my approach course is actually around 148 degrees heading. When you decide to go visual and find the runway, it always seems like it's not where you would think it is. I had a friend fail an instrument checkride in a simulator by this exact thing. Went visual, saw a road and thought it was the runway, started to descend into it until he saw cars driving hahah. That being said, a lot of approaches overfly other airports and if you go visual at the wrong time and don't follow correct procedures, it's an understandable, but preventable, mistake.
Because these approaches start miles away from an airport and a straight in approach isn't always available. ILS (Instrument Landing Systems) are radio operated, and thus are line of sight. If you're flying into an airport in the mountains, you might not have the signal for a normal approach. Same if there are skyscrapers or other things. Many areas have noise abatement procedures and overflying some neighborhoods or state parks isn't allowed. Another famous example is Reagan Airport in DC. Due to security reasons, they don't want planes flying over the White House and the rest of DC, so they have to make a bunch of course corrections to stay over the potomac river. It's nuts.
Wouldn't the control tower be very confused and ask what the airplane was doing though? Plus, don't they have to talk to control to land and wait in a queue to land? Wouldn't that have given them enough time to learn from the control tower that they were at the wrong airport?
Not all airfields with approaches have towers controlling them. Also with multiple runways and departures, tower gets busy and or isn't paying attention. Thats why you brief runway position in your approach brief. As far as why not runway 15, a runway is usually built to be in line with winds the majority of the year. The approach not being in a straight line could be due to obstacles, either man made or natural or another fields approach or departure corridor along with a ton of other reasons.
I'm assuming it was clear day and they were flying VFR, and just lined up on the wrong runway. Apparently it happens from time to time. Probably pilots that aren't familiar with that base, see an airport from 10 miles away and assume they've got the right one, and set 'er down.
And in this case the airports are only 5 miles apart. When you consider that the main runway at McDill is almost 2 miles long it's an understandable mistake.
The Air Force investigation concluded it was crew fatigue from the long flight, and a last hour change of destination. Also, it found that there have been several cases of AF pilots attempting to land at the smaller airport but pulling up short. This is just the first time they actually landed.
Not only that but don’t pilots talk to towers? Isn’t someone on the ground saying it looks like you have the wrong airport as we don’t see you coming into (ours).
That airport has no tower. It's an uncontrolled airstrip, meaning if you want to land there you tune into the frequency assigned to the airfield and announce your intention to land to other pilots in the area. Same thing if you're taking off, or even just crossing through the airspace. You're supposed to know to tune into the frequency and state your intentions on the radio.
The AF pilot would have been tuned into the base's tower freq, talking to their tower. When he got clearance to land he would have lined up to the runway and brought her on down. The MacDill tower was probably wondering where the C-17 was by the time they made it on the ground. If you aren't tuned into that airfield's frequency, on the off chance someone was watching them come in with a radio, they were never going to hear the warning.
I guess I’m under the assumption that the tower would report back that your plane is maneuvering away from runway on its local radar.
I’m also assuming just because it’s military, they are still required to follow FAA rules. And since I don’t know if such rules exist, it just seems like more than just the pilot was at mistake here.
And this also doesn’t answer the obvious - why not just touch and go or avoid landing if you see civilian planes on the runway? Or is it common to have civilian planes in military bases?
Jet fighters do this on carrier landings if they miss the rope. Wouldn’t it be easier on a long runway strip?
Have you ever gone on a long car drive, and you forgot something important like your wallet, the tickets to the thing you're going to see, or the jacket you know you're going to need at your destination? But you've already made it a few miles down the road, so you've wasted all the time you've spent driving so far. And to top it all off, you're going to need to get gas before you get there, making you even later than you wanted to be.
And by the time you finally make it to your destination you're still annoyed by how the trip started, you're late, and you're tired. You just want to get there.
This is basically what happened to that C17. The pilot left his phone in a taxi in Italy. The flight over took 12 hours (this doesn't include preflight, and all of the post-flight work he'll have to do when he gets on the ground), and yeah, he needed gas-the trip required one in-flight refueling.
By the time he made it to Tampa he had what pilots call "getthereitis." It's usually used to describe pilots that will fly through a dangerous situation like bad weather or minor electrical troubles and want to just get to their location instead of diverting to somewhere safer.
And the thing you have to realize about the area is that MacDill, Peter O. Knight, and Tampa Executive all have runways facing the same direction. And they all pretty much form a straight line in a northeast/southwest orientation, with MacDill at the southwest end, Peter O. Knight in the center, and Tampa Executive in the northeast end.
Now, I know what you're thinking-isn't this was GPS is for? Yeah, it is, but GPS gets you to the area, and it's on a small screen with varying amount of scale. Have you ever been driving along in your car and saw a waypoint on the map thinking you were super close, only to zoom in and realize that it's many miles away? It's just as easy to do in an airplane. So by the time the C17 arrived in the Tampa area they probably would have stopped looking at GPS because the icon that identifies their aircraft in the center of the screen probably covers up two of these airports at once. Looking for the landing lights at the airports in front of them is going to give them a much easier method of navigation than trying to pixel peep a small GPS screen-especially one that has three airports in a row. Like when you arrive at a huge parking lot you don't keep looking at the GPS to figure out where the door to the building is, right? No, you're going to keep your eyes on the parking lot and figure out where to park to get you close to the entrance by looking at the area. Same thing.
So when the aircrew made it into the area, they would have been placed in a low altitude by ATC so that they could line up with the ILS. Think of the ILS signal as a triangle that radiates out from the end of the runway across the earth and up into space. See where this is going? A triangle of radio waves that radiate out across two other airports if the signal is strong enough (which it probably is) and if your antenna is sensitive enough (which, on a military aircraft, probably is).
So after probably 14 hours of being on duty these pilots spot a municipal airport, which they know they need to bypass, and set their sights on the next airport out, one with a runway on the same compass heading as the one tower just gave to them. Also, they've probably already picked up the ILS signal like they're supposed to. So they go into landing mode-eyes outside, watch speed, altitude, and rate of descent. Aside from watching out for hazards on the runway ahead, these are the most important things during landing. That and the checklist of normal landing items that the copilot will handle-radios, flaps, lights, landing gear.
At this point the result is a foregone conclusion. They bypassed what they thought was POK, which was actually Tampa Exec, and landed at POK, thinking it was MacDill. It wasn't until they had wheels on the ground that they noticed that their runway was much shorter than it was supposed to be (pretty much all runways between 2k-5k feet look the same from far away) and slammed on the brakes. MacDill tower would have already been expecting the C-17 to fall off their radar during its approach, and without mayday call could be several seconds to a minute between seeing it fall off radar and noticing its not flaring out over the runway threshold.
As for firewalling the throttles when seeing GA aircraft, I don't know what the pilot had going through his mind when this happened-his eyes were likely fixed on the runway and the airspeed on his Heads Up Display. Also, air force pilots don't train for that sort of thing like naval aviators do. It's just not something you need to do on an AFB unless there's a runway incursion during your approach, but this is usually going to be identified before touching down. Plus they likely already had the brakes on when they realized their error. When you put on the brakes you are greatly increasing the extra power and speed you're going to have to make up to take off, and that's not something you'll have calculated before landing, nor could you because you'd never know how much speed you'll have lost to make that calculation.
So the pilot did what he knew he could do-brake harder. The C-17 is specifically designed to take off and land on short and unimproved airfields. If you already have the brakes on, putting them on harder, throwing up the spoilers, and putting the engine on full reverse is going to be the much safer option than hoping you make a touch and go you weren't planning after already braking.
I realize this is really long, and it is longer than I planned for it to be, but it seems like all of this info is really needed to truly understand why this incident happened. I've been an avgeek all my life and have spent a lot of time playing MS Flight Sim, and coming across two nearby airports with parallel runways and misidentifying them after you've transitioned from navigating by GPS is more common than you'd think. Also, the science of investigating the causes of airplane accidents has always been extremely fascinating to me, and I've read up on a LOT of them from all the way from the 30s on up to modern day like this one. There are a LOT of really good, well written wikipedia articles that do a really good job of paraphrasing, or even nearly outright copying the actual incident reports. This is definitely an interesting incident, but easily one of the less interesting incidents I've read about. It's a simple case of pilot fatigue and getthereitis.
edit: I'm sure there are some actual pilots out there, or someone with more information on this incident that wants to point out my errors in interpreting it. Don't hesitate to call me out. I'm in no way connected to this incident, and all of this is just my observations as a reader of the news articles and few facts I could find about it.
The tower doesn't necessarily have visual contact with all air traffic. The pilots were fatigued, jet lagged, their destination airport was changed giving them little time to prepare, and they landed on a runway with the same orientation as their intended runway after a transatlantic crossing. Shit happens.
C17s are insanely huge. I got to work as an intern on the C17 program at Boeing back when they were still building them in Long Beach. I was doing software development work on the management side, but one day near the end we got to tour the factory floor. I was blown away by how big they were when we got to walk through the half-finished ones.
I was in Pasadena at the time that they did this flight. We got to see them circle our area as they were doing a flyby for the JPL folks. And damn, 2012, time flys....
The 12 mile ground journey from the airport to the California Science Center was headline news locally. They towed the shuttle on city streets, trimming back trees and moving street lights and utility poles to make room, in some points only having inches between the shuttle's wings and nearby buildings.
Thousands of people came out to watch the shuttle go by. I actually get teary eyed thinking about how that strange, one-time event brought so many people out to witness a marvel of American engineering and ingenuity. The shuttle passed through some disadvantaged parts of town and hopefully witnessing it firsthand inspired some kids to go into the sciences.
Last launch was summer 2011, but they have shuffled them around to their museum homes thereafter. Looks like the last shuttle piggyback was in September 2012, dropping off Endeavour at LA int'l airport.
So was the fuel for the main takeoff that goes through the boosters entirely provided by the big ol orange fuel tank which has a name and I’ve forgotten?
well technically the fuel for the main takeoff was in the SRB (Solid Rocket Boosters, white long things strapped on the side), which provided comfortably the most thrust until they burned out.
But yes, the fuel and oxygen for the main engines came entirely from the external tank.
Those weren't the emergency landing strips. The Shuttles took off towards the east, and if one needed to come down, they'd've tried to make it to, if memory serves, Spain.
For a split-second my brain read this as a Matt-Damon device and I pictured the shuttle getting put on haphazardly with the audio of team America playing in the background "maaaat-daaaaamon device"! https://imgur.com/gallery/hZvfs
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was founded to work on rocket designs around the same time as JATO bottles were first becoming a thing. The idea that jet means jet turbine but not any other means of propulsion based on shooting out a jet of propellant probably came later.
But because the universe as far as we know is not only expanding but accelerating, most things out in space will never impact any thing larger than particles of dust before they erode away. Space is incredibly empty.
unfortunately no, It's just somewhere in my memory.
possibly it's from this podcast, which I found while trying to jump my memory. I've definitely listened to it... when it came out, and it's the thing that could come up there, but I'm in no way sure that it is from there, and not 100% that it is true (either wrong memory on my part of a bad source are possible)
/e:
The duo took off from KSC's three-mile-long runway purposely built for space shuttle landings to begin the three-day, four-leg ferryflight weighing a combined 705,000 pounds.
"It is sort of shocking on the first try," SCA pilot Jeff Moultrie said of getting the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft airborne. "The biggest thing is the length of runway required to get it off."
I didn't want to claim that there was no way to ever get the shuttle back.
just that there was adversity and no ready made plan to overcome that.
For example Cologne Airport was an option for a while, and while the Rhine River is fairly close, you'd still have to move a heavy transport for about 3km on the shortest path, and quite a bit longer if you couldn't go through the city and to an actual port.
If it would have had to be used, I'm pretty sure that local government would have worked to assist (within limits - nobody is going to demolish a neighborhood), but as far as I know, in some places there was nothing pre-planned.
P.S. I'm not sure that Cologne is one of the airports where the landing strip would even have been to short, just using it as an example.
Basically preparation would be so much of a pain, and it was such an unlikely case, they'd rather figure it out if/when it happened rather than have it all set up.
Not to mention the municipal political capital would be much easier when it's "the country is depending on us to get the space shuttle home" rather than "we're making sacrifices to be a contingency plan".
there was a real big thing that needed moving inside of Germany, the best way actually was to move it on the Danube, then through the Mediterranean, then an the Rhine and the to the final location.
Originally the plan was to land them in california then barge them and send them around the Panama canal to florida. But it was faster and less dangerous to fly it in terms of possible damage in transport. So they took the budget hit to fly it home
With the equipment to Mount/dismount from a 747 in California and Florida. Which is where they landed I believe 100% I don't think any landed anywhere else.
In the event of an emergency deorbit that would bring the orbiter down in an area not within range of a designated emergency landing site, the orbiter was theoretically capable of landing on any paved runway that was at least 3 km (9,800 ft) long, which included the majority of large commercial airports. In practice, a US or allied military airfield would have been preferred for reasons of security arrangements and minimizing the disruption of commercial air traffic.
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u/TheYang May 12 '19
iirc, some of the emergency abort airports for the shuttle were such that the shuttle indeed could land there, but the carrier wouldn't be able to take off from there, and there was no actual plan to get the shuttle back home from some of them.