There has been a lot of "wrong airport" landings. Sometimes in the wrong country.
I can't say that I've ever landed at the wrong airport. But at least once, decades ago, at night, I got lost.* I saw an airport below me and I landed there. I told the guy at the desk that I landed to use the bathroom.
But I really landed there so that I could see the airport's name over the door of the FBO.
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* If my memory is right, that airplane had a single nav/com, if a Narco Omnigator could ever be called a "nav/comm". It could find the direction to a VOR station, but only if you were within about two miles of the station. The comm side had a range of about seven miles. I was both young and foolish to do a night x/c in that airplane.
Sorry, But Santa Is Way Ahead Of You
2 hours ago
2 comments:
Truth be told, I nearly did it once back during my cross-country training days. Two airports, both with runway 23, just a few miles apart, and due to stronger winds than I'd planned for, I wound up at one right about when I should have arrived at the other. Only problem was that both were tower-controlled and busy commercial hubs, and when I called up the tower where I thought I was, they clears me for a straight in landing on runway 23, which I reported having in sight. I proceeded in, cutting off a four-engined jet that I never saw, and nearly had my little 152 on the runway before the tower at that field figured out what the 152 was likely doing and got on my intended airport's frequency to scream at me and order me to make an immediate turn out of their pattern. And yeah, my CFI got a phone call before I was even close to being back.
Stuff happens. But to be fair, I was a novice student pilot flying with a chart and a watch, not a commercial pilot with a GPS and a co-pilot.
Murphy: Ouch! About the same level of embarrassment, one of my cross countries to a towered airport, and I started setting up my entry into the pattern... after having visually chosen the wrong runway to prepare for.
Upon realizing what I had done, and spending some time trying to figure out what I should have REALLY been doing, I let my plane buzz along in a straight line.
And then I got the call from the tower: "Do you see the runway directly beneath you?!"
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