Harrison Ford’s Blunder

Yesterday, Harrison Ford was flying his small plane and accidentally landed on a taxiway instead of a runway. There was a jet there waiting to take off, and he flew over it before landing on the taxiway. This has caused a lot of people to overreact. (See here.) Here are some of the reactions:

• “He is to old to fly.” It’s remarkable how many people can’t spell “too.”

• “He is too old to fly.” Ford is 74, and one of my flight instructors is 79. This is an individual thing, and not something that should be hard and fast. I thought it was ridiculous that Captain Sullenberger had to retire just because he turned 65.

• “His reflexes are bad.” What do reflexes have to do with this incident?

• “His license needs to be yanked.” He will still be able to fly because anyone can fly an ultralight plane so long as they do it out in the country. Anyway, there’s a lot of ways pilots can be certified, and since the only problem on this flight was landing on a taxiway instead of a runway, something less drastic than yanking his license could be considered. For example, he could be prohibited from flying in and out of class B and class C airports (see here and here).

• “His license should be suspended, and he should be in jail.” This is like demanding jail time for someone who accidentally turned the wrong way onto a one-way street.

• “He could have killed all 116 passengers.” That seems unlikely. I bet if you had a hundred incidents like this, only one would involve an actual crash since any halfway decent pilot will know enough not to crash into another plane when they can just do a go-around. And even if there had been a crash, I find it hard to believe that all the passengers would be killed. That didn’t even happen in this incident, which is the deadliest crash ever and which involved two 747s. Yet, some passengers in the plane on the ground still survived. Why, then, would a little plane crashing into a giant jet inevitably cause all the passengers to die?

• “Anyone who flies a single-engined plane is delusional.” Sheesh, those are the planes in which we learn to fly!

• “He’s like JFK, Jr. and John Denver.” Not really. JFK, Jr., made a lot of really bad decisions, and Denver made a bad decision to fly some weird experimental plane. Ford’s problem was more a minor loss of situational awareness.

• “There’s a saying in aviation circles; there’s OLD pilots and there’s BOLD pilots, but there’s no OLD, BOLD pilots. I guess Ford shot down that theory.” Again, not really. He wasn’t doing anything wild and crazy, so it’s not as though he counted as a bold pilot (at least as far as this incident is concerned).

• “This is his fourth incident. If he weren’t so rich, his license would have been revoked years ago. I fly out of Santa Monica (SMO) regularly, and it is well known around the airport that he is unsafe and a “clear and present danger” to the flying and general public. Rumor has it his last BFR was totally bogus as the CFI never even bothered to fly with him and merely signed off his logbook.” Ok, someone is finally providing something like evidence.

• “As a professional pilot with over twenty thousand hours flight time I van tell you that anyone can make a mistake. That’s why I laugh at the notion of flying cars.” Very sensible. There were lots of people saying that either they had accidentally lined up with a taxiway or knew of others who had done so. I myself, while looking over to the airport, have picked out taxiways as the place to land, but fortunately I realized my error long before I actually lined up with it. But I can see how this might get as far as it did for Ford. All you have to do is imagine that before he figured out which was the actual runway, he had some distraction in the cockpit.

• “This is not the runway you’re looking for.” The best comment of all!

I have a gripe that has nothing to do with this incident and everything to do with the Internet. Why arrange comments in a format in which one must “load more comments” to see more comments? Why not just put them on pages the way a lot of sites do?

Comments

[Charles N. Steele]

I appreciate your comments on this. Maybe it's just me, but here's something about an informed opinion that seems superior to an uniformed one. Yes, probably just me, since so many uniformed opinions abound on the 'net that they must be more popular.

[Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)]

Aren't taxiways and runways marked differently, according to some universal convention? For example, taxiways might have big diamond-shaped patterns painted on them. Is there some other way to make taxiways and runways obviously distinguishable?

[John Pepple]

They are marked differently, though if you are a few miles away, you won't notice the markings. What I suggested was that he got mixed up a few miles out, and then never corrected himself because of some distraction in the cockpit.

Taxiways aren't marked with anything special you'd see in the air, while runways will have various markings, plus the number of the runway right near its beginning. I always aim for those numbers, but not everyone does.

I suppose you could have some flashing beacon helping you, but it might be difficult to see in broad daylight, which is when this happened. As for evening and the night, there are already plenty of lights that will distinguish them from a taxiway.

Mistaking the two is a problem that will happen every now and then because of human mistakes, just like accidentally turning the wrong way onto a one-way street.

[John]

A couple of points on the post and then a story. The first regarding the John Denver accident. To classify the Burt Rutan designed Long EZ as as "a weird experimental plane" and fault John Denver's choice to buy and fly it is an emotional statement that does not square with the facts as presented in the NTSB report.

The Long EZ has a wonderful safety record, in fact a friend of mine is building one right now. The NTSB did find the location of the fuel tank switching valve as a factor, along with Denver's failure to actually fuel the plane prior to take off. As you know a pilots familiarity with control locations and functions is of critical importance whether the plane is factory built or not. In the Denver crash the NTSB found he had not taken the time to properly train himself on the aircraft and in searching for the tank transfer valve had likely applied rudder causing a roll to stall.

Next, I pretty much agree with the rest of your critique on comments by people who don't know what they are talking about because they weren't there.

Now a story: The year was 1975 and my C-130 squadron was operating temporarily out of Frankfurt International, Germany. It was perhaps the busiest airport in western Europe. A normal arrival would have us step down from altitude through about 4 holding patterns and then initiate an ILS approach to 09L (preferred) or 09R. On Christmas eve one of our aircraft was returning from a mission, the ceiling was about standard (1,000 ft) viability about average (1 mile) and the aircraft was cleared for the ILS for 09R with a side step to 09L once they had visual.
The crew flew the approach and when they had 09R in sight they slide over to what they thought was 09L, unfortunately they misidentified the center taxiway and landed on it.
Thankfully outbound traffic was light and there was no other aircraft on the taxiway. Tower called them up and asked if they knew where they had landed. The blue taxiway lights were a give away and they acknowledged they knew. The last thing Tower said was "Switch to ground control, and Merry Christmas."
The moral of the story... humans make mistakes, professional or amateur we all make mistakes.

[John Pepple]

Thanks so much for your input. I should have been more specific about what was weird on Denver's plane, namely, the fuel tank switching valve. As I understand it from Wikipedia, it was only on his particular plane that that was a problem because the builder put it behind the pilot, when the design called for it to be in between his legs.