Update to 767 Taxiway landing; the Plot Thickens

On Monday 19 October 2009, Delta Flight 60 was enroute to Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport (KATL) when a check pilot on board experienced a medical emergency in midflight. The crew decided to push on to Atlanta and were given clearance to land on Runway 27R. At just after 0600 eastern time the Boeing 767 landed on the parallel taxiway “Mike”, just north of runway 27R instead of runway 27R as directed. Not much has been heard about the taxiway landing incident because it was quickly overshadowed by two other airline pilots missing their destination airport by well over 100 miles because they were BOTH distracted on their laptops.

The initial reports of the incident were of course brief and tended to distinctly highlight the suspension of the pilots pending a through investigation. After additional research the plot has thickened however. Initial reports describe the local conditions at Hartsfield as 10 miles visibility, night/ dark conditions (sunrise was not till 0746 local). The runway and taxiway lights were both illuminated, however the runway localizer was not on and approach lights were not illuminated. Effectively, it appears the pilots established their final approach on what was their best estimate for runway 27R. The typical Atlanta pattern tends to have a long final. Without approach lights or a localizer, on a very dark morning just before down, I can see how they could have had a difficult time picking out the runway among the more than 10 sets of parallel and crisscrossing lights below. Once they were close enough to Atlanta to determine, (without approach lights or localizer help) that they were lined up on a taxiway instead of a runway, and with a medical emergency on board, I can see they were at a conundrum. They could see the taxiway was clear of any other aircraft (landing lights, and collision avoidance lights would no doubt be visible at that range) so they had two choices. One, land on a taxiway or two, go around thus spending additional time. It appears they choose to land on the taxiway, presumably in an effort to save their passenger’s life. Some of you may be questioning, why didn’t the pilots just ask the tower to turn on the approach lights or the localizer, I have heard unconfirmed reports that they did request multiple times for both aids to be turned on, but their requests were not honored. The plot thickens again.

I for one am interested to see the results of the NTSB investigation! To our readers, what would you do if faced with a similar situation?

References: Aircrew Buzz .com and cnn.com for fact support to this article.