NW flicks lost Airbus pilots

Northwest Airlines has fired the pilots who on June 19 mistakenly landed a plane at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota instead of the Rapid City Regional Airport, about 7 miles away.

After the wayward landing, Jay Leno and other comedians poked fun at the carrier on national TV. One Leno barb: “Northwest Airlines announced a new slogan today — ‘Where the hell are we?’ “

Initially, Northwest “held from service” the two pilots pending a review of the incident, which is still under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The airline’s pilots union revealed the firings Tuesday when asked about the U.S. Air Force’s recent release of tapes of June 19 conversations of air traffic controllers at the military base.

The fired Northwest pilots, whom neither the union nor the company would identify, are grieving their dismissal, said Will Holman, spokesman for the Northwest Airlines Air Line Pilots Association. The firings took place about July 20.

“We believe the punishment is excessive,” he said. “Since the incident, charts and navigational databases have been modified to clearly show both” airport and air base locations.

He said there “have been several previous instances” of pilot confusion between the Ellsworth Air Force Base and the Rapid City airport. But none, Holman said, involved Northwest pilots.

Northwest would neither confirm nor deny that the pilots have been fired.

The Ellsworth base provides approach and departure guidance to all planes flying within 40 miles.

In response to a request from the Pioneer Press of St. Paul, Minn., the Air Force released tapes of its controllers’ communications with and about the Northwest plane. The tapes, which apparently include communications with the Rapid City Regional Airport, indicate that the plane’s landing at the base surprised not only its pilots but also air traffic controllers who had been watching it.

The base’s airfield was closed, as it normally is on Saturdays.

“We didn’t even see him land,” says a woman on the tape as she speaks with a serviceman who says security forces were “a little upset” to have the commercial airliner on a runway of the B1 bomber base. And he adds, “Col. Brown is not going to be happy with this one,” in an apparent reference to base commander Col. Joseph Brown.

The woman speaking on the tape says that mistaken landings had “almost happened a couple of times earlier today.”

The Air Force on Tuesday did not identify her but did say she is not a member of the Air Force.

The problem, she indicates, is that civilian planes follow a radio beacon at the nearby regional airport that takes them over the Air Force base.

“They are basically just guiding off a radio and the radio kind of takes them down the center of runway 14″ at the Rapid City airport,” she says. “So, when they pop out of the clouds, they see the (Air Force base) runway, they don’t trust their instruments and all of a sudden make a dive. And that’s basically how it happened.”

As airliners near the Air Force base, “their data tag drops off,” she says about a broadcast electronic identifier. “So, we can’t even see them … when they are over the runway.”

Shortly after landing, a pilot on the Northwest plane asked if he could head for the right airport.

“We made a mistake in landing here instead of Rapid City,” he says. “If it’s OK with you, we can just depart. Hop over.”

But it was more than three hours before the plane, an Airbus 319 with 122 passengers and five crewmembers, was allowed to hop over to Rapid City.

During that time, military officials questioned the crew. Eventually, the captain and first officer were replaced by a different Northwest crew, who flew the plane to Rapid City.