How Could a Boeing 747 Crew Err So Badly?

Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 09:25 PM ET

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Key Takeaways:

A Boeing 747 Dreamlifter mistakenly landed at the wrong airport, an incident mirroring past navigational errors by other large aircraft like the C-17 and B-52.
The Dreamlifter crew exhibited poor situational awareness, taking a significant amount of time to determine their actual landing location even after stopping.
The author highlights that modern general aviation aircraft with advanced avionics (e.g., Garmin G1000 with SafeTaxi) and personal devices offer far superior and unambiguous positional awareness.
The article concludes that large aircraft cockpits need substantial improvements in situational awareness tools, suggesting an adoption of technology found in modern general aviation and consumer mapping applications.

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The odd case of a Boeing 747 Dreamlifter mistakenly landing at Wichita’s Jabara Airport instead of its intended destination, McConnell Air Force Base about 7 miles to the south, wasn’t the first time the crew of a mammoth jet made such a colossal positional error.

You might remember our story last year about a C-17 bound for MacDill Air Force Base in Florida that mistakenly landed at the much smaller Peter O. Knight Airport in Tampa. In 2004 at the Farnborough Airshow, I watched as a U.S. B-52 bomber that was supposed to perform a low pass missed the airport and instead did a fly-by at unsuspecting Blackbushe Airport five miles away.