As we all know, Harrison Ford landed his Husky on a taxiway at John Wayne County Airport a few months back
(No further FAA disciplinary action occurred -- according to this article --> http://www.tmz.com/2017/04/03/harrison-ford-plane-cleared-faa-investigation/).

Meanwhile, today, I saw this article: https://www.yahoo.com/news/air-canada-jet-nearly-lands-taxiway-san-francisco-203716807.html

Yikes! I'm glad they averted that one as it would have been disastrous.


Regards,
4 <S!>

Just Google "taxiway landing incidents" and you should see multiple incidents that happened long before Harrsion's incident. I am not saying it is a common occurrence but it wasn't quite as uncommon as some here made it seem.


Wheels

Taxiway C has painted borders (green) but this wouldn't seen at night.

...seriously? A trend?

I've landed on taxiways in Falcon. Am I in trouble?

I don't know if it's a company policy problem or what, but people need to start using their nav gear before landing VFR especially at unfamiliar airports.

On most aircraft punching 6 buttons is enough to input and display ILS or VOR info. Takes literally 10 seconds for PNF to do it. How many of these incidents could be avoided by checking if they're on the radio / gps centerline or not?

One of these days somebody is going to screw up royally and land VFR on the wrong runway, and it'll be too short to stop their aircraft.

SFO seems to have a lot of problems with this. IIRC the Asiana 777 crash had unfamiliarity with VFR procedures as one factor in the crash. Is SFO's navigation equipment down a lot or?? (Not saying it's SFO's fault, though I have heard a lot of terrible ATC at SFO and LAX) The pilots have the responsibility of landing the airplane safely and in the correct location, but it's a combined effort that helps prevent even stupid or incompetent pilots from making serious mistakes that could hurt people or result in an incident.

How people could screw up the runways at SFO is a little confusing though, considering it's a tic tac toe board layout and the runway positions are VERY obvious. Apparently the incident happened at 11:55pm - do these idiots not remember the basics of runway lighting? No taxiway is lit up like an SFO runway. The guy must have been trying to line up on the taxiway in the top left corner of this picture. Stupid. Apparently 28L was darkened and he was probably used to both runways being lit up so assumed the taxiway lights were 28R and the runway lights were 28L. But the lights are not even close to the right color nor layout to be a runway. Really stupid, unprofessional. Back to private pilot's school for this pilot.

this is what I didn't get, I always assumed airliners had to fly in like this, especially at night so I was shocked how this happened.

Not sure if others can see this without logging into pprune, this is the track of the flight:


i made a business out of training japanese and korean pilots how to avoid this kind of problem by having PNF verify ILS or RNAV alignment before landing even VFR, and to GA if the alignment is off, despite company policy on the issue. better safe than dead. i am certain if the pilots on this flight had been from an asian airline we'd be looking at several wrecked aircraft and hundreds of dead people right now.

thankfully some hero on the frequency was watching out for traffic and warned everyone that AC was coming down on the taxiway. if he had not done that everyone would have been dead.

this was way too close for comfort. they cleared the tail of the first aircraft on the taxiway by barely 200 feet.

Seriously -- it was a tongue in cheek title. Sorry that was lost on you.

@Wheels - yep, I know it's a (relatively) common mistake which often doesn't receive much notoriety until an airliner or celebrity brings it to public attention.

I'm in agreement with Longbow's assessment. Certainly, in Harrison's case it's fairly unlikely that he would have that equipment in the Husky, and he also didn't have another "crew" member to cross check his procedure, but there's absolutely no (valid) excuse for an airliner to make that sort of mistake apart from failure to follow proper CRM procedures, pilot inattentiveness, or outright incompetence. They were very, very lucky to avoid an epic disaster.


Regards,
4 <S!>

Goddamn, I could land sideways on those runways!

Wasn't lost on me in the slightest, so good news- you don't have to apologize.

What was lost on you was that was a way for me to say "what a stupid thing to even type" without insulting you. Sorry you didn't detect the subtlety.

Use of the term trend doesn't mean people are doing it because it's cool, asuing that's what caused offence. Would've been a perfectly acceptable title even without the quotation marks.

trend

verb
1.
change or develop in a general direction.
"unemployment has been trending upwards"

I too find it a bit perplexing. Now I've never had a pilot's license, but I've done a few takeoffs and landings in real life.

SFO has HUGE runways.

Smaller airport, where the runways aren't much bigger than the taxiways, that I can understand.

To do that at SFO, seems to me as major as driving on to a freeway on the wrong ramp in the wrong direction.....

Even if 28L was closed at the time, which it seems to have been, the lack of several hundred yards of approach lights, green threshold lights, centreline lights, touchdown zone and edge lights on the taxiway should be a major clue you're lined up wrong.

That said, fatigue can do strange things. These guys landed at 3am in their local time zone, and who knows what sort of rosters AC have nowadays.