Landing At The Wrong Airport

     In looking into other aircraft incident where they mistakenly landed at the wrong airport, I found a United Flight operated by Silver Airways. This occurred in August of 2012, when the flight was intending to land at Clarksburg but ended up landing at Fairmont.  Its seems that according to the CNN article about the Silver airways Saab 340B, it landed at an airport about 10 miles away.  This is similar to the other incidents regarding the Boeing 747 aircraft and Southwest 737, which both landed at the wrong airport about 9 and 7 miles from their intended destination. 

     Some of the hazards in making this kind of mistake can be involved with the airline companies reputation.  When an aircraft incident occurs, whether or not people are injured it will mostly likely make some type of headlines.  Along with that another factor would be money or revenue, if an airline makes a few mistakes like this I could see people choosing to fly with another company.  Also things like the logistics of getting the passengers on board these flight to their correct destination could be difficult.  It's the airlines responsibility to coordinate getting these passengers to the intended airport in a timely manner.  I could see this affecting and causing problems as this is not the type of incident that would be anticipated.    

     In my opinion, in reading the Gazette article on Southwest Flight 4103, the pilots made an error that could have been corrected before landing at the Taney County Airport.  I do however think in some situations the media does over-hype aircraft incidents.  I think that until a full investigation had been completed it would be difficult to determine the exact reasoning.  In the incident with the Boeing Dreamlifter, it seemed that the pilots confused their intended destination for the Jabara Airport.  I think that in this cause the pilots also mistakenly landed at the wrong airport, and I would have thought with their navigation and experience they would have been able to correct this event as well.  I think that these incidents are not the types of things that the media should be focused on as there were no catastrophic events that occurred from them.  In both cases I think the pilots made an error and were able to land the aircraft safely.

     As a management major, I would tend to agree with suspending the Southwest pilots until the investigation is completed.  In researching, I found that the skies were clear and it was about 6pm.  I would think that with the training and experience that the pilots had they should have been able to notice and abort the landing before touching down.  The article said that the intended, Branson Airport had a runway of more than 7,100 feet long and Taney County Airport had a runway just over 3,700 feet long.  It seems like a pilot should be familiar with longer runway lengths and know the field is significantly shorter.