I was letting down toward my destination airport in good VFR, on an IFR flight plan. Listening to the CTAF on the other radio, I realized there was a Cessna in the traffic pattern along with another arrival, just a few miles ahead. I had to slow down in the descent for the turbulence, and was busy looking for the traffic. I had the airport in sight but couldn’t spot the traffic, which was odd.
The other arriving airplane reported a five-mile final, which, coincidently, was where I was in relation to the runway I had spotted. But I couldn’t see him. There was enough ambiguity in my ADS-B traffic display that I couldn’t be sure about the other airplane’s position.
So I stopped my descent and—looking in the direction of my turn—made a shallow-banked 360-degree turn. Rolling out back toward the runway, I heard the arriving traffic report off the runway and the pattern traffic on the go portion of a touch-and-go.
By then I was on a two-mile final. I was verifying my airplane’s configuration and looking at the runway when it dawned on me: This is the wrong runway. A glance at the moving map showed me a good five miles south of my intended destination, about to land at the wrong airport.
I added full power and cleaned up the airplane, climbing back to above pattern altitude. Shortly, I spotted the “real” airport and reconfigured for landing, easily making the midfield turnoff.
Quite frankly, I was a little rattled, and sheepishly taxied in, shut down and walked into the FBO. No one paid any attention to me or remarked about my approach.
After a snack and a drink, I was ready to head back out and asked the line person to top off my plane. Filling out his fuel record, he asked for my N-number; I told him.
“Oh,” he said. “We got a call about you from ATC—they’re looking for you.”
Huh? Then it dawned on me—I never canceled my IFR flight plan. A quick call to the clearance delivery number cleared that up. Thankfully, that was all there was to it.
Looking back, on all this, I realized I was hyper-focused on the local traffic, even though it turned out to be no factor whatsoever. There were many clues that I was aiming for the wrong airport, which a close look at a chart would have revealed, but I was fixated on the traffic.
That’s not always a bad policy, but it was on this day. At least I didn’t land at the first airport—that would have been too much of a learning experience.
Have you encountered a situation or hazardous condition that yielded lessons on how to better manage the risks involved in flying? Do you have an experience to share with Aviation Safety’s readers about an occasion that taught you something significant about ways to conduct safer flight operations? If so, we want to hear about it.
We encourage you to submit a brief (500 words) write-up of your Learning Experience to Aviation Safety for possible publication. Each month, Aviation Safety publishes a collection of similar experiences sent to us by readers. Sharing with others the benefit of your experience and the lessons you learned can be an invaluable aid to other pilots.
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