Oops

[Tomliner]

Some explaining to do here methinks. EricT

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-c ... o-released

[Filonian]

Lummme.

Who was navigating? Leslie Phillips?

Graham

[Dev One]

No - he would climb to 5000 ft!
keith

[Vancouver]

P'raps Harrison Ford? In all seriousness, terrifying to think what could have happened.

[Swanoir]

I honestly don't understand this one. Most of you guys will know better than me, but I thought that even if a pilot elects to manually fly a landing (which is rare these days), they would still tune in all the Nav radios/FMC etc so that your Flight Director is picking up the ILS? So surely, BOTH pilots would have seen via their instruments that they were to the side of the Glide scope? How on earth can this kind of error happen in this day and age?

Harrison Ford, on the other hand, in his Millennium Cub, should know better, and the transcription from his close encounter makes him sound like a right arrogant tool...

[Archer]

They can indeed set up the FMC/FD to show a localiser overlay but if they are flying a visual approach, it depends on the company's SOPs whether they should always do this. Especially if they were expecting a different approach, accepting a short lineup to a visual approach may involve a bit of reprogramming of the FMC to get the localiser to show up. In such a case they may have omitted this to save time. I don't know all the details for this incident, we'll have to await the full report for that, but with the runway labeled 28R this may have led the pilot flying to convince himself that he should line up on the rightmost strip of asphalt.

Not all that long ago a KLM 737 took off from a taxiway at Schiphol airport instead of from the (parallel) runway. Things like this happen, but fortunately it didn't turn into an accident in these two cases.

[Tomliner]

Good point Swanoir but I think it's the offset from the localiser you're referring to not the glideslope. Either way it's puzzling how this could happen. Luckily no one was hurt or worse. EricT