The U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III belonging to the 305th Air Mobility Wing that mistakenly landed at Tampa’s Peter O. Knight Airport in, Florida at the end of a ferry flight from southwest Asia, departed from the small regional airport just before sunset on Jul. 20.
The aircraft had to burn several hours of fuel to lighten the plane and be able to safely depart from the small airfield on Davis Island, whose runway is 3,580 feet long and 100 feet wide, aligned in the same direction as MacDill’s runway (that is 11,421 feet long and 151 feet wide).
Although one might believe that this kind of incident is impossible with the avionics of most modern planes, human errors are always possible, and pilots continue to end up landing on runways or taxiways on the wrong airports.
It would be interesting to know whther the plane was performing a visual approach or simply ignored the ILS (Instrumental Landing System) indications and/or ATC radar vectors….
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