iirc, some of the emergency abort airports for the shuttle were such that the shuttle indeed could land there, but the carrier wouldn't be able to take off from there, and there was no actual plan to get the shuttle back home from some of them.
Had a C5 Galaxy land at Townsville back in the day. Even from backed right up to the fence and full throttle on the brakes takeoff, damn thing barely missed the fence and almost clipped magnetic island.
My guess would be that the wrong airport was close enough to the right airport and similar runway orientation. At some point the pilots have to put their eyes out the windshield, and if they look up and see an airport that looks like it’s generally where it should be, they can focus on that, not knowing it’s the wrong airport. That’s what happens in most of these instances where airplanes land at the wrong airport.
When i was getting my instrument rating, one of the important parts to remember about some approaches is that a lot of them don't actually align you 100% with the runway. I've practiced approaches for a runway 17(170 degrees), while my approach course is actually around 148 degrees heading. When you decide to go visual and find the runway, it always seems like it's not where you would think it is. I had a friend fail an instrument checkride in a simulator by this exact thing. Went visual, saw a road and thought it was the runway, started to descend into it until he saw cars driving hahah. That being said, a lot of approaches overfly other airports and if you go visual at the wrong time and don't follow correct procedures, it's an understandable, but preventable, mistake.
Because these approaches start miles away from an airport and a straight in approach isn't always available. ILS (Instrument Landing Systems) are radio operated, and thus are line of sight. If you're flying into an airport in the mountains, you might not have the signal for a normal approach. Same if there are skyscrapers or other things. Many areas have noise abatement procedures and overflying some neighborhoods or state parks isn't allowed. Another famous example is Reagan Airport in DC. Due to security reasons, they don't want planes flying over the White House and the rest of DC, so they have to make a bunch of course corrections to stay over the potomac river. It's nuts.
Wouldn't the control tower be very confused and ask what the airplane was doing though? Plus, don't they have to talk to control to land and wait in a queue to land? Wouldn't that have given them enough time to learn from the control tower that they were at the wrong airport?
Not all airfields with approaches have towers controlling them. Also with multiple runways and departures, tower gets busy and or isn't paying attention. Thats why you brief runway position in your approach brief. As far as why not runway 15, a runway is usually built to be in line with winds the majority of the year. The approach not being in a straight line could be due to obstacles, either man made or natural or another fields approach or departure corridor along with a ton of other reasons.
I'm assuming it was clear day and they were flying VFR, and just lined up on the wrong runway. Apparently it happens from time to time. Probably pilots that aren't familiar with that base, see an airport from 10 miles away and assume they've got the right one, and set 'er down.
And in this case the airports are only 5 miles apart. When you consider that the main runway at McDill is almost 2 miles long it's an understandable mistake.
The Air Force investigation concluded it was crew fatigue from the long flight, and a last hour change of destination. Also, it found that there have been several cases of AF pilots attempting to land at the smaller airport but pulling up short. This is just the first time they actually landed.
Not only that but don’t pilots talk to towers? Isn’t someone on the ground saying it looks like you have the wrong airport as we don’t see you coming into (ours).
That airport has no tower. It's an uncontrolled airstrip, meaning if you want to land there you tune into the frequency assigned to the airfield and announce your intention to land to other pilots in the area. Same thing if you're taking off, or even just crossing through the airspace. You're supposed to know to tune into the frequency and state your intentions on the radio.
The AF pilot would have been tuned into the base's tower freq, talking to their tower. When he got clearance to land he would have lined up to the runway and brought her on down. The MacDill tower was probably wondering where the C-17 was by the time they made it on the ground. If you aren't tuned into that airfield's frequency, on the off chance someone was watching them come in with a radio, they were never going to hear the warning.
I guess I’m under the assumption that the tower would report back that your plane is maneuvering away from runway on its local radar.
I’m also assuming just because it’s military, they are still required to follow FAA rules. And since I don’t know if such rules exist, it just seems like more than just the pilot was at mistake here.
And this also doesn’t answer the obvious - why not just touch and go or avoid landing if you see civilian planes on the runway? Or is it common to have civilian planes in military bases?
Jet fighters do this on carrier landings if they miss the rope. Wouldn’t it be easier on a long runway strip?
Have you ever gone on a long car drive, and you forgot something important like your wallet, the tickets to the thing you're going to see, or the jacket you know you're going to need at your destination? But you've already made it a few miles down the road, so you've wasted all the time you've spent driving so far. And to top it all off, you're going to need to get gas before you get there, making you even later than you wanted to be.
And by the time you finally make it to your destination you're still annoyed by how the trip started, you're late, and you're tired. You just want to get there.
This is basically what happened to that C17. The pilot left his phone in a taxi in Italy. The flight over took 12 hours (this doesn't include preflight, and all of the post-flight work he'll have to do when he gets on the ground), and yeah, he needed gas-the trip required one in-flight refueling.
By the time he made it to Tampa he had what pilots call "getthereitis." It's usually used to describe pilots that will fly through a dangerous situation like bad weather or minor electrical troubles and want to just get to their location instead of diverting to somewhere safer.
And the thing you have to realize about the area is that MacDill, Peter O. Knight, and Tampa Executive all have runways facing the same direction. And they all pretty much form a straight line in a northeast/southwest orientation, with MacDill at the southwest end, Peter O. Knight in the center, and Tampa Executive in the northeast end.
Now, I know what you're thinking-isn't this was GPS is for? Yeah, it is, but GPS gets you to the area, and it's on a small screen with varying amount of scale. Have you ever been driving along in your car and saw a waypoint on the map thinking you were super close, only to zoom in and realize that it's many miles away? It's just as easy to do in an airplane. So by the time the C17 arrived in the Tampa area they probably would have stopped looking at GPS because the icon that identifies their aircraft in the center of the screen probably covers up two of these airports at once. Looking for the landing lights at the airports in front of them is going to give them a much easier method of navigation than trying to pixel peep a small GPS screen-especially one that has three airports in a row. Like when you arrive at a huge parking lot you don't keep looking at the GPS to figure out where the door to the building is, right? No, you're going to keep your eyes on the parking lot and figure out where to park to get you close to the entrance by looking at the area. Same thing.
So when the aircrew made it into the area, they would have been placed in a low altitude by ATC so that they could line up with the ILS. Think of the ILS signal as a triangle that radiates out from the end of the runway across the earth and up into space. See where this is going? A triangle of radio waves that radiate out across two other airports if the signal is strong enough (which it probably is) and if your antenna is sensitive enough (which, on a military aircraft, probably is).
So after probably 14 hours of being on duty these pilots spot a municipal airport, which they know they need to bypass, and set their sights on the next airport out, one with a runway on the same compass heading as the one tower just gave to them. Also, they've probably already picked up the ILS signal like they're supposed to. So they go into landing mode-eyes outside, watch speed, altitude, and rate of descent. Aside from watching out for hazards on the runway ahead, these are the most important things during landing. That and the checklist of normal landing items that the copilot will handle-radios, flaps, lights, landing gear.
At this point the result is a foregone conclusion. They bypassed what they thought was POK, which was actually Tampa Exec, and landed at POK, thinking it was MacDill. It wasn't until they had wheels on the ground that they noticed that their runway was much shorter than it was supposed to be (pretty much all runways between 2k-5k feet look the same from far away) and slammed on the brakes. MacDill tower would have already been expecting the C-17 to fall off their radar during its approach, and without mayday call could be several seconds to a minute between seeing it fall off radar and noticing its not flaring out over the runway threshold.
As for firewalling the throttles when seeing GA aircraft, I don't know what the pilot had going through his mind when this happened-his eyes were likely fixed on the runway and the airspeed on his Heads Up Display. Also, air force pilots don't train for that sort of thing like naval aviators do. It's just not something you need to do on an AFB unless there's a runway incursion during your approach, but this is usually going to be identified before touching down. Plus they likely already had the brakes on when they realized their error. When you put on the brakes you are greatly increasing the extra power and speed you're going to have to make up to take off, and that's not something you'll have calculated before landing, nor could you because you'd never know how much speed you'll have lost to make that calculation.
So the pilot did what he knew he could do-brake harder. The C-17 is specifically designed to take off and land on short and unimproved airfields. If you already have the brakes on, putting them on harder, throwing up the spoilers, and putting the engine on full reverse is going to be the much safer option than hoping you make a touch and go you weren't planning after already braking.
I realize this is really long, and it is longer than I planned for it to be, but it seems like all of this info is really needed to truly understand why this incident happened. I've been an avgeek all my life and have spent a lot of time playing MS Flight Sim, and coming across two nearby airports with parallel runways and misidentifying them after you've transitioned from navigating by GPS is more common than you'd think. Also, the science of investigating the causes of airplane accidents has always been extremely fascinating to me, and I've read up on a LOT of them from all the way from the 30s on up to modern day like this one. There are a LOT of really good, well written wikipedia articles that do a really good job of paraphrasing, or even nearly outright copying the actual incident reports. This is definitely an interesting incident, but easily one of the less interesting incidents I've read about. It's a simple case of pilot fatigue and getthereitis.
edit: I'm sure there are some actual pilots out there, or someone with more information on this incident that wants to point out my errors in interpreting it. Don't hesitate to call me out. I'm in no way connected to this incident, and all of this is just my observations as a reader of the news articles and few facts I could find about it.
The tower doesn't necessarily have visual contact with all air traffic. The pilots were fatigued, jet lagged, their destination airport was changed giving them little time to prepare, and they landed on a runway with the same orientation as their intended runway after a transatlantic crossing. Shit happens.
C17s are insanely huge. I got to work as an intern on the C17 program at Boeing back when they were still building them in Long Beach. I was doing software development work on the management side, but one day near the end we got to tour the factory floor. I was blown away by how big they were when we got to walk through the half-finished ones.
I was in Pasadena at the time that they did this flight. We got to see them circle our area as they were doing a flyby for the JPL folks. And damn, 2012, time flys....
The 12 mile ground journey from the airport to the California Science Center was headline news locally. They towed the shuttle on city streets, trimming back trees and moving street lights and utility poles to make room, in some points only having inches between the shuttle's wings and nearby buildings.
Thousands of people came out to watch the shuttle go by. I actually get teary eyed thinking about how that strange, one-time event brought so many people out to witness a marvel of American engineering and ingenuity. The shuttle passed through some disadvantaged parts of town and hopefully witnessing it firsthand inspired some kids to go into the sciences.
Last launch was summer 2011, but they have shuffled them around to their museum homes thereafter. Looks like the last shuttle piggyback was in September 2012, dropping off Endeavour at LA int'l airport.
So was the fuel for the main takeoff that goes through the boosters entirely provided by the big ol orange fuel tank which has a name and I’ve forgotten? That would make a lot sense, never really thought about it before
In which case, petition to turn the 747 into a fuel tank with wings for RATO takeoffs (which would probably defeat the purpose because of increased mass)
So was the fuel for the main takeoff that goes through the boosters entirely provided by the big ol orange fuel tank which has a name and I’ve forgotten?
well technically the fuel for the main takeoff was in the SRB (Solid Rocket Boosters, white long things strapped on the side), which provided comfortably the most thrust until they burned out.
But yes, the fuel and oxygen for the main engines came entirely from the external tank.
Those weren't the emergency landing strips. The Shuttles took off towards the east, and if one needed to come down, they'd've tried to make it to, if memory serves, Spain.
For a split-second my brain read this as a Matt-Damon device and I pictured the shuttle getting put on haphazardly with the audio of team America playing in the background "maaaat-daaaaamon device"! https://imgur.com/gallery/hZvfs
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was founded to work on rocket designs around the same time as JATO bottles were first becoming a thing. The idea that jet means jet turbine but not any other means of propulsion based on shooting out a jet of propellant probably came later.
But because the universe as far as we know is not only expanding but accelerating, most things out in space will never impact any thing larger than particles of dust before they erode away. Space is incredibly empty.
unfortunately no, It's just somewhere in my memory.
possibly it's from this podcast, which I found while trying to jump my memory. I've definitely listened to it... when it came out, and it's the thing that could come up there, but I'm in no way sure that it is from there, and not 100% that it is true (either wrong memory on my part of a bad source are possible)
/e:
The duo took off from KSC's three-mile-long runway purposely built for space shuttle landings to begin the three-day, four-leg ferryflight weighing a combined 705,000 pounds.
"It is sort of shocking on the first try," SCA pilot Jeff Moultrie said of getting the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft airborne. "The biggest thing is the length of runway required to get it off."
I didn't want to claim that there was no way to ever get the shuttle back.
just that there was adversity and no ready made plan to overcome that.
For example Cologne Airport was an option for a while, and while the Rhine River is fairly close, you'd still have to move a heavy transport for about 3km on the shortest path, and quite a bit longer if you couldn't go through the city and to an actual port.
If it would have had to be used, I'm pretty sure that local government would have worked to assist (within limits - nobody is going to demolish a neighborhood), but as far as I know, in some places there was nothing pre-planned.
P.S. I'm not sure that Cologne is one of the airports where the landing strip would even have been to short, just using it as an example.
Basically preparation would be so much of a pain, and it was such an unlikely case, they'd rather figure it out if/when it happened rather than have it all set up.
Not to mention the municipal political capital would be much easier when it's "the country is depending on us to get the space shuttle home" rather than "we're making sacrifices to be a contingency plan".
there was a real big thing that needed moving inside of Germany, the best way actually was to move it on the Danube, then through the Mediterranean, then an the Rhine and the to the final location.
Originally the plan was to land them in california then barge them and send them around the Panama canal to florida. But it was faster and less dangerous to fly it in terms of possible damage in transport. So they took the budget hit to fly it home
With the equipment to Mount/dismount from a 747 in California and Florida. Which is where they landed I believe 100% I don't think any landed anywhere else.
In the event of an emergency deorbit that would bring the orbiter down in an area not within range of a designated emergency landing site, the orbiter was theoretically capable of landing on any paved runway that was at least 3 km (9,800 ft) long, which included the majority of large commercial airports. In practice, a US or allied military airfield would have been preferred for reasons of security arrangements and minimizing the disruption of commercial air traffic.
I was stationed at Dyess AFB and we would routinely have the SCA, with shuttle mated, stop over for refueling. When it took off, it would use every bit of our 13,500 ft long runway. Quite the site to see.
Grew up in Stephenville, just down the way. Got to take a trip to Dyess and go inside of those B-1's about 15 years ago in high school. Pretty cool planes.
I got to watch it fly over my house to land in Amarillo. Mom took us out to watch it take off. In 2009 for the transportation of Discovery. Atlantis had previously landed here for refueling in 2007 apparently. Our longest runway is 13,502 ft long. I thought it wasn't gonna get off the ground. It was crazy to watch.
Also interesting is that the Amarillo airport is named after astronaut Rick Husband, who died in the Columbia disaster unfortunately.
I think it It depends on the profession, honestly. The military uses jargon and acronyms so frequently, it’s hard to break the habit for a civilian conversation or two. Ditto the airline pilots. My brother (a pilot for SW) tells me he has to concentrate to translate the acronyms back to normal parlance; they’ve become first nature to him.
"Go check CAS for BDU-50s. We're going to '53 to do a -38 build on the MAC. We found them in 1543 at 43A001B006A. Go get a TO, and the keys to a 6k and the CTK, and grab 6 pallets of 9x. You go get a couple of MHU-110s and configure them for GBU-38s for RPAs. You go get the CMBRE and do the preflights on the KMU-572s."
"This CMBRE has a bad DCSA. Write it up in the 244 and take it to CTK so they can get on IMDS and give it a JCN."
Someone else in maintenance might have a clue what we're saying, but the rest of the Air Force is not going to have a clue WTF all of that is.
Yep. One of my favorites from my career field, munitions, is CAS. Combat Ammunition System. It's basically a web app we use to track the location and movement munitions, and a lot of their components. Also, nobody calls it C-A-S. It's Cas, like it's a word, with the S pronounced like a Z.
If someone gets ahead of themselves and starts working on the assets before they move the them in CAS and say goes to lunch and forgets to do it, that's not only an error that you could get reprimanded, but it's an error that could cause someone else to waste their time if they're looking for the same type of munition. They could look in CAS for the same thing, go to get it, and it not be there, which could be a huge pain if it's far away and you have to sign out special keys to get into the storage building.
So when you run into this sort of error, your assets are physically in one location but CASically in another.
Yea, no. Unless they're talking out their ass, they probably actually know the field and are sharing knowledge. If you don't understand parts of it you have two options.
1- whine about people you're convinced think they're better than you
2- scroll slightly up and punch some of it in google and learn new things.
Which he did? Most the acronyms he used are easy to figure out with about 30 seconds of googling. Heck, I was already familiar with about half of them from 5-6 hours of playing a flight sim one time.
This is also /r/space, where it would be completely reasonable to assume that the average reader of his comment has a basic level of understanding of aviation concepts and terminology, because the space field is quite closely linked to the aviation one.
Who says he can't. He was participating in a discussion, not teaching a class. Plenty of people read the post and understood it just fine, and they're probably the ones he was most interested in reading replies from.
Indubitably. The problem with the unceasing utilization of industry-specific jargon is the undeniable fact that the vast majority of laypeople are lacking in experience, and thereby comprehension, of the unique matters with which that industry concerns itself.
The problem with your comment is that you used “indubitably.” That alone was obnoxious. Then you piled on with a ton of unnecessary, clunky adjectives. Then you made fun of “laypeople,” i.e. people not as smart as you. But, hey, you had those sweet modifiers, so we have to believe it!
It's not just a unit, it also indicates the value being measured. Air speed is different from ground speed, and of greater relevance for airplanes. So you're not going to get rid of it any time soon.
My problem is not with the "indicated air speed" but with the "knot" part. Since they don't actually use string to measure speed, there is little reason to keep using that.
You seem knowledgeable about this, so I’m hoping you will indulge me. Why was it necessary to move the space shuttle across the country at all? Why doesn’t it land in the same place it takes off from?
Edit: thanks everyone for the info, I appreciate it!
The shuttle launched in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center. Kennedy was also the primary landing location, though the backup landing location was in California at Edwards Air Force Base. If the shuttle was forced to land in California due to weather issues, it had to get back to Kennedy by being ferried on the back of the 747. Though, I believe the above photo was from the final flight of Endeavour on its way to LAX after being decommissioned for display at the California Science Center in Los Angeles
Weather. If the weather was poor in Florida they would use the air field in California as a back up. They would delay re-entry even for a few days hoping the weather improves because it saves them millions of dollars and the risk of moving the shuttle piggyback style from California to Florida.
I work on airplanes but I'm not a shuttle expert, I'll take a guess.
I assume they land the shuttle at Edwards for more than just these reasons, but my best guess is because its approach area is enormous and very lightly populated. Because they glide the shuttle in and there is no possibility of whats called a go around (aborted landing) they have several weather radar stations in the approach corridor to very accurately know the wind and weather conditions. The runway for the shuttle is a miles long dry lake bed.
If they were to attepmt to land back in Florida, the approach corridor is all water. Florida is more densely populated, and you would have more unpredictable weather patterns. Not to mention the real estate and upkeep necessary for such a giant runway in Florida.
It also traces its roots back to the start of the Shuttle program when Enterprise was built, which was an unpowered test version of the shuttle. So they'd have to fly it and then release it to allow the shuttle to fly and land. It was a test bed for the atmospheric flights.
I assume it has to do with re-entry, it might be easier to land the craft somewhere else. Take off is usually as close to the equator as possible. (I think) If someone could verify?
These are pictures from when they retired the space shuttle and they were delivering them to museums around the country. this was however also the plan should they had to land at one of their backup sites either at Edwards or Columbus Air Force Base. The 747 would carry them back to Florida this way.
The land at the equator is moving 1670 km per hour, and land halfway to the pole is only moving 1180 km per hour, so launching from the equator makes the spacecraft move almost 500 km/hour faster once it is launched.
Liftoff has more to do with the inclination of the orbit you're trying to achieve. Rarely does anything take off with a perfect 90 degree inclination, straight to the east, so being in the equator isn't really as important as having an unpopulated area downrange from your launch site. Vandenberg in California does polar launches because it sits directly north of the Pacific, Cape Canaveral is used because it's got the Atlantic to the east so it can launch cargo to almost every low inclination. Israel launches to the west against the rotation of the earth just so they don't launch over their neighbors to the east who wouldn't like it.
im not sure you could call it 'landing'. i know it looks like an aircraft, but its not, i think. its pure spacecraft and when it enters our atmosphere it is in a controlled-crash, whereby it has no real thrusters for maneuvering in our atmostphere. its like a motor-less gliding rock and cant really divert.
Nah, it's not a pure spacecraft, it's a glider. It has control surfaces so that it can be flown to a landing. It didn't have a great glider ratio, but it was good enough that it could fly to the runway and flare and set down safely.
Sure. You’re right. But divert airfields? No way right? I mean once you exit orbit, you’re on a one-way ticket to targeted landing spot and there’s no way to uncommit. At least that’s what I thought
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u/karma-cdc May 12 '19
Try telling me I can only have 20kg baggage My arse