Pilots often head to wrong airports, reports show

[Palmpilot]

This probably won't come as a surprise to anyone here.

http://news.yahoo.com/pilots-often-head-wrong-airports-reports-show-092049243.html

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Do you know the way to San Jose? Quite a few airline pilots apparently don't.

On at least 150 flights, including one involving a Southwest Airlines jet last month in Missouri and a jumbo cargo plane last fall in Kansas, U.S. commercial air carriers have either landed at the wrong airport or started to land and realized their mistake in time, according to a search by The Associated Press of government safety databases and media reports since the early 1990s.
(I'm not sure that seven or eight times a year constitutes "often." I just used the article's headline as the thread title.)

 

[Jim Logajan]

(I'm not sure that seven or eight times a year constitutes "often." I just used the article's headline as the thread title.)

Comments attached to Yahoo stories can be amusing and occasionally interesting, but one commenter named "rob" managed to put the numbers in perspective (and had 33 thumbs up and 0 thumbs down at the time I read it):

"This article epitomizes misleading journalism. The article is titled, "Pilots OFTEN head to wrong airports, report shows", but the data doesn't show this at all. The article cites a grand total of 150 flights at least on the wrong approach over the span of two decades. There are nearly 10 million commercial flights every year in this country, or somewhere in the ballpark of 200 million flights over the course of the study. That leaves us with 150 out of 200,000,000, which is an INFINITESIMALLY small percentage of incidents. There are FAR more deaths caused by faulty elevators in this country than planes landing at the wrong airport, to give you some perspective on frequency. The author of this article, Joan Lowy, should be ashamed of such shoddy reporting"