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Article Summary - Wrong Airports Landing Heighten safety Concerns

The article basically throws alight on the very unusual and ignored factor that cause airport safety concerns because of the large number of aircrafts in the air at the same time in the American air space. The article discusses about the errors committed by the pilots while landing due to the excessive reliance over the automated system for landing. There have been incidences where in the air planes have landed at the wrong airports disturbing the regular flow of flights at that airport and causing time delays to the passengers. Apart from creating immense inconvenience to the passengers, the ground staff as well as the flight crew also gets disturbed by this miscalculation while landing. Though there have been a handful of incidences that have been seen but the mere fact that such a mistake can occur, puts a huge question mark on the efficiency of the automated systems because of which the pilots do not use their own judgements while making these decisions. Contrary to this some pilots also landed on the wrong airport as they saw runway lights during the night when actually their systems showed they were quite far from the actual destination. They tend to ignore the system at night as they get guided by the lights of the first airport they saw after descent. These errors occurred in the regions where several airports are situated in a radius of few miles like San Francisco Bay area. This problem puts a huge risk to the passengers as normally the right airport would provide clearance from the controller to get a smooth surface all the way on the runway but if the landing airport is the wrong one, then there might be anything lying on the runway causing a collision.

References

Joan Lowy, Wrong Airports Landing Heighten safety Concerns, (2014), BC Bay Area,

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/Pilots-often-head-to-wrong-airports-reports-show-244726231.html