You have all seen the news; Northwest Airbus misses Minneapolis with crew preoccupied with whatever they were doing… But this is not such a big deal. Listen to the following story.
In September 1995 I was out walking the dog (we had a wonderful Siberian Husky called Cyrano) when I noticed a DC-10-30 in Northwest livery taking off from Brussels. We live near the airport and our walks with Cyrano always had a dual purpose. Sniffing for the dog, plane spotting for me…
Northwest did not have flights in and out of Brussels and seeing the plane climbing steeply I said to myself, good, finally they are coming here also and I will not have to connect via Amsterdam when flying to the US (I was a WorldPerks member so flying NWA or KLM was important).
Well, they did fly into Brussels but only that once and unintentionally at that.
The DC-10 was originally operating as NW52, Detroit-Frankfurt. Through an incredible combination of clearances, vectors, unnoticed references to Brussels and Frankfurt mostly in the wrong context uttered by the pilots as well as the controllers, the plane was finally lined up on the final of runway 25 in Brussels… still believing they were approaching Frankfurt. The controllers did not seem to mind being called Frankfurt… At 08.16 the pilot radioed “Frankfurt tower, NW 52 is established on the ILS 25”. Brussels tower did not correct the obvious mistake.
When the pilot made visual contact with airport, he felt that something “did not look right”. At 500 feet AGL they knew for sure that the runway under the nose of the DC-10 was not Frankfurt. I have been wondering ever since… what airport did they think they were looking at?
While this was going on, the more seasoned passengers were no doubt puzzled beyond belief when they saw the flight following system’s map showing Brussels coming up while they were being told that they would be landing in Frankfurt momentarily…
Obviously, Mr. Murphy was hard at work that day screwing up just about everything he could, in the cockpit and on the ground. Nobody was hurt in the incident but neither was there a new Northwest service from Brussels, much to my regret.
After reading this, missing Minneapolis by a few dozen miles is nothing really…
Read a more detailed report on the incident here.