Wrong runway is no joke

Everyone seems to be treating this story as a bit of a joke – a pilot landing on the wrong runway seems like a cause for mirth, with passengers recounting amusing anecdotes of finding themselves in the middle of an army base. But I think people are missing the point.

The pilot had no clearance to land his aircraft at the army base. If, as he’d been bringing the aircraft in to land, there had been another aircraft on the runway, or a vehicle crossing it or even some fixed object in the way, the consequences could have been disastrous for all concerned – it certainly wouldn’t have been one of those "And finally…. [chortle!]" stories.

Clearly, either the systems need to be improved to ensure that this sort of error can not occur again, or the existing systems need to be more rigorously enforced. I guess we will have to wait until the outcome of the enquiry to find out which is the case.

2 Replies to “Wrong runway is no joke”

  1. Quite a lot of the chortling I have seen is striking me as anti-Irishness – let’s all laugh at the t’ick Paddies.

    I agree with the scenarios you have suggested but also have some hazy memory of planes in the past landing or nearly landing on motorways – not including the Kegworth crash in January 1989 when the plane crashed on the M1 because it couldn’t make it to East Midlands.

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