Nearly 200 passengers and crew narrowly escaped catastrophe when their Delta airlines Boeing landed on a taxi-way instead of the runway at Atlanta airport, the Federal Aviation Agency has disclosed.
The FAA is investigating why Delta Flight 60 from Rio de Janeiro to Atlanta's Hartsfield international airport put down on the taxi-way parallel to the runway an hour before sunrise on Monday morning.
By great luck, no other aircraft were present on taxi-way M, which runs the full length alongside the 12,000ft runway 27 Right at Atlanta, the world's busiest airport by passenger numbers. There was no damage to either the taxi-way or the aircraft, a Boeing 767.
The pilots have been relieved of their flying duties pending an investigation by the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board, said Anthony Black, a spokesman for Delta. Visibility was good at the time of the night landing. The pilots may have been under pressure to land quickly because they had notified controllers that they had a medical emergency aboard, airport sources said. Nothing else unusual was reported.
Smaller aircraft occasionally land on taxi-ways after pilots — often non-professionals — mistake long taxi-ways with runways. This has occurred several times recently at Palm Beach airport in Florida. There have been cases of airliners landing at the wrong airport but there has been only one recent case of a large airliner confusing taxi-ways with runways in the United States. In 2003 an American Airlines aircraft landed on a taxi-way at Seattle.
The mistake can arise at night at large airports in built-up areas. Active runways are highly lit with white lights, while taxi-ways are lined with blue lights to distinguish them. Aircraft approach on instruments and auto-pilot which align them with the active runway, but one of the crew usually takes over to hand-fly the last phase to the touch-down.
Confusion over runways can arise when a controller asks an approaching aircraft to switch from one landing runway to a nearby parallel one. Atlanta has a complicated runway lay-out, with two sets of two parallel runways plus a single one, making a total of five runways in the same direction, with parallel close taxi-ways.
There was speculation among pilots that the crew of Flight 60 may have mistakenly aimed for a taxi-way after being told to switch runways. The consensus on aviation websites was that the pilots may simply have made a visual mistake. "There but for the grace of God..." was a common comment.
If the plane, landing at about 160mph (257 km/h), had hit a plane or a vehicle on the runway the consequences could have been catastrophic.
The incident comes after an intense campaign by the FAA to curb runway incursions — when aircraft stray onto active runways when they should be on taxi-ways. The opposite took place in this case.
Serious runway incursions were down 50 per cent in the first six months of this year, said the FAA. Only two serious incursions involved commercial airliners in 2009, compared with nine in 2008.
"Pilots are trained to land on the runway," said Kathleen Bergen of the FAA. "Taxi-way landing is not appropriate, so we will be investigating it very thoroughly in determining why that happened."
