A Boeing 747 Dreamlifter mistakenly landed at Jabara Field instead of its intended destination, McConnell Air Force Base, a confusion attributed to multiple similarly oriented runways in the Wichita area, especially at night.
Contributing factors included pilots likely switching from an instrument to a visual approach, missing distinct visual cues like airport beacon types (military vs. civilian) and advanced lighting systems, and being influenced by confirmation bias.
Though no injuries occurred, the incident was dangerous due to Jabara's significantly shorter runway and highlights a recurring problem of large aircraft mistakenly landing at smaller, incorrect airports.
Now that the world knows the story of the Boeing 747 Dreamlifter that landed at the wrong Wichita-area airport on Wednesday night, everybody is asking the same question: how could it have happened? That is, how could a professional crew of a large cargo airliner get it so wrong?
The answer is, it’s all too easy to do.
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A commercial pilot, Isabel Goyer has been flying for more than 40 years, with hundreds of different aircraft in her logbook and thousands of hours. An award-winning aviation writer, photographer and editor, Ms. Goyer led teams at Sport Pilot, Air Progress and Flying before coming to Plane & Pilot in 2015.
