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Pilots missing key visual, instrument cues: FAA

Jan. 20, 2014, Dallas, Tx. - The wrong-airport landing by Southwest Airlines, the second incident in two months by U.S. carriers, is heightening regulators' concerns that pilots are missing obvious visual and instrument cues while failing to check one another's work.


January 20, 2014  By The Washington Post-Bloomberg

Lack of monitoring has been identified as an issue in the July 6
crash of an Asiana Airlines plane in San Francisco that killed three. An
Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings jumbo-jet freighter used a municipal
airport instead of McConnell Air Force Base on Nov. 20 in Wichita, Kan.

 

Pilots of the Southwest Boeing 737-700 that landed
after dark Jan. 12 on a Branson, Mo., county runway would have had
multiple indications they weren't at their intended destination 12
kilometres away.

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"It's a matter of a flight crew letting
its guard down," Earl Weener, a member of the U.S. National
Transportation Safety Board, who isn't involved in the Branson probe,
said. "It's not unusual. I wish it were."

 

The NTSB and U.S. Federal Aviation
Administration are investigating the Branson incident. The pilots, who
have been with Southwest for 26 years between them, were suspended with
pay.

 

The safety board cited
pilots' failure to monitor their instruments and flight path in the
crash of a commuter flight by Pinnacle Airlines Corp.'s former Colgan
unit on Feb. 12, 2009. The crash killed 49 on the plane and a man on the
ground.

 

Similar issues are under review in the
Asiana crash, according to an NTSB hearing on the accident in December.
Pilots didn't notice the plane was flying too slow to stay aloft until
seconds before it struck a seawall short of the runway at San Francisco
International Airport.

 

Modern airliners are equipped with GPS
guidance systems and computers programmed to find commercial airports.
Even paper charts would have provided clues the Southwest pilots were
approaching the wrong airport.

 

While both runways in Branson are headed
southeast, they are 20 degrees off from each other.

 

The runway used by
the Southwest pilots wasn't equipped with the colour-coded lights pilots
use to tell whether they are high or low on approach, according to
AirNav.com. Branson Airport has the lighting system.

 

Scientists who study human error have a
term for why pilots sometimes press on in spite of clues that they
shouldn't. It's called "confirmation bias," said Patrick Veillette, a
Park City, Utah, commercial pilot who has taught aviation safety.

 

Pilots descending on a
dark night may spot an airport and instinctively head toward it,
Veillette said. "If the runway is sort of the same direction you're
expecting to land on, it's real easy to get fixated on that," he said.

 

"We seek out information that confirms
our decision. We're not very good at noticing the cues saying, no, this
isn't right," he said.

 

Pilots missing signs of trouble was
identified as an issue in the 2002 crash of a FedEx Corp. Boeing 727 in
Tallahassee, Fla., according to a July 17 presentation by NTSB member
Robert Sumwalt.

 

"It must become accepted that monitoring
is a core skill," Sumwalt said. Sumwalt is helping lead a study on the
issue sponsored by the Alexandria, Va.-based Flight Safety Foundation.

 

Investigators will want to know what the
Southwest pilots discussed before attempting the landing in Branson and
whether they tried to verify they were at the correct airport, Kevin
Hiatt, president of the foundation, said.

 

"There is a lot of instrumentation there to indicate where they are," Hiatt said. "But how effective were they in using it?"

 

Flight 4013 from Chicago carried 124
passengers and five crew members, said Brad Hawkins, a spokesman for
Dallas-based Southwest.

 

It landed shortly after sundown on the
runway at M. Graham Clark Downtown Airport in Branson, which is 1,139
metres long. The strip at their intended destination, Branson Airport,
is 2,176 metres long, according to the AirNav.com airport information
website.

 

After an abrupt stop that flung
passengers forward in their seats and the cabin filled with the odor of
burning rubber from the tires, a pilot acknowledged what had happened
over the public address system, Scott Schieffer, a passenger, said in an
interview.

 

"Ladies and gentleman, I am sorry, but we
landed at the wrong airport," the pilot said, according to Schieffer, a
Dallas tax and estate-planning attorney.

 

The plane stopped within 61 metres of a rocky embankment that plunges toward a highway, he said.

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