Dude needs to hang up the goggles. Enough is enough.

http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/harrison-ford-has-incident-passenger-plane-airport-n720826

FAA might pull his ticket this time.

There will be old pilots and there will be bold pilots but there are no old, bold pilots.

Your thread title scared me. I'm glad to hear he's ok.

I thought the same thing.

While the others could have been aircraft malfunctions, it's hard to explain away landing on a taxiway instead of the runway. Can't see the FAA pulling his ticket, though. Some mandatory retraining, maybe.

Taxiways can be very confusing on the ground, but on final it is really something to confuse them.

Doesn't seem he was doing anything bold. He just screwed-up. Very serious screw-up. They will probably pull his ticket for a year, have mandatory training, and do a check ride.

Maybe he had Falcon BMS flashbacks on final? The graphics are beginning to look pretty real...

more celebs that can BUY their fun... but sometimes it costs lives.

John Wayne 20L
He had to fly over some buildings to land on the taxiway. Looking at it from an aerial view it should be easy to distinguish the runway from the taxiway unless the sun was causing some havoc which depending on the time of day would be a distinct possibility.


Wheels

Well, hopefully not Millenium Falcon flashbacks, any ways...

Fixed it for you. Hope it looks right. Bad day. Wife crazy. Job sucks. Half way through bottle of Glenfidditch

Not enough facts to judge the guy...

I only see a couple more buildings being overflown on an approach to the taxiway (red line) as opposed to a proper approach to 20L (green line).

+1

Maybe he thought he was flying old style IL-2 in multi-player, where one takes off from the runway and lands on the taxiway!



His "last incident" was an engine out, and he handled that pretty much perfectly, so I don't know why the article threw that in the mix.

Probably because the only knowledge of aviation the authors have is sitting in an airliner seat.

I was trying to get that angle.
Thanks F4U.


Wheels

There is a lot of information based on standard piloting and airfield markings. This was a standard VFR landing. Runways have their numbers painted large and clear (20L) on the threshold. He should have been using that as part of establishing his landing sight picture. In his favor is that 20L does not have the two large white "Captains Bars" at the normal touchdown point and it doesn't have the normal runway width indicator bars at the threshold. So it is missing a couple normal runway markings that 20R has. But runways all have painted lines in white and taxiways are yellow. So when he lined-up for the centerline it should not have been yellow. It should have been white. Also runway center lines are not solid but are large white dashes. Taxiway lines are solid yellow. He should have been looking at the precision approach lights , PAPI ( in this case P4L, which means 4 lights to the left of the runway) which are white or red lights that show if you are high or low on the approach. They are on the left for 20L and landing on the taxiway would have put them on the right. That is not standard placement and not according to the AFD Airfield Directory which he should have known. I looked at the NOTAMS, Notice to Airmen, and the ights and markings were not an issue when he landed. The NOTAMS does show they are/were inoperative for a period on the 16th.

Use Google Earth and look at John Wayne Airport and you can see all this. It is more clear than the picture in F4UDash4's post.

So, no runway number painting, yellow versus white paintings, solid versus dashed, and PAPI lights on wrong side should all have been very powerful indicators that he was screwing-up. These things are standard at all airports and he knew them.

Plus his pilot mind should have been registering that the layout had him landing too close to the gates. That should have triggered his brain even if nothing else did. It would all have just looked wrong, especially to an experienced pilot. The width should have looked all wrong to him since the runway is much wider than the taxiway. I would very surprised if this was his first time at that airport. It should have been familiar to him. And a huge indicator that something was wrong was the commercial aircraft he flew over. As he approached he should have seen that something was amiss.

Way too many indicators that he was screwing-up.

But it is easy to get distracted and fail to follow proper procedures and indicators. That is why on landing pilots establish a "sterile cockpit" and pay no attention to other things except for the landing. The brain can only handle so much at a time and when it gets overloaded it either fails to register more info or starts processing other info poorly trying to handle additional info. Landing is a whole bunch of info load on the brain. You can miss things or process something poorly and not realize it. And once your brain establishes something as right, it is difficult to get it reoriented to it being wrong. That is why pilots land with their gear up or at the wrong airport.

But he screwed-up. Badly.

Streak of bad luck, could happen to anyone and age has nothing to do with it.