A feature by John Davison with additional credit and thanks to the Daily Mail and Lufthansa.

Disaster averted – from the days when the Boeing 707 was a “giant jet”

Below is the scanned image of an article from the Daily Mail of Wednesday 29^th April 1964 relating to the approach and overshoot by Boeing 707-330B D-ABOT of Lufthansa late in the afternoon of Tuesday 28^th April 1964. Noticing the aircraft heading for Runway 26 at Northolt (as it then was * ), instead of Runway 23L at Heathrow, air traffic control alerted the crew to their error and directed the aircraft onwards to Heathrow where it landed safely. In the closing paragraph reference is made to the Pan-American Boeing 707 that actually landed in October 1960, its crew having made a similar navigational error. The large letters “NO” and “LH” were subsequently painted on the sides of gasholders at Harrow and Southall respectively to reduce the chances of similar mishaps occurring.
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TEXT OF THIS ARTICLE:

Giant jet scare at the wrong airfield

By Daily Mail Reporter

A BOEING 707 jet airliner nearly landed at Northolt airfield yesterday in mistake for London Airport. The 130-ton plane was down to 100ft. when the pilot realised his error. He increased engine power and lifted the plane up again.
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The blue and yellow Boeing, of Lufthansa, the German airline, circled and landed safely a few minutes later on its correct runway at London Airport, about five miles away. The 51 passengers on the flight from Frankfurt said they noticed nothing unusual. Northolt is an R.A.F. station and has been closed to civilian traffic since 1954.
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What went wrong?

A Ministry of Aviation official said last night: “The Boeing pilot was making a visual approach landing on Runway 23 Left at London, which runs parallel with Runway 26 at Northolt. “The pilot told the control tower he could see the runway and he was coming in to land. Control told him to go ahead.

Cloud blamed

“Then the control-tower radar screen showed the Boeing veering off towards Northolt. “The pilot was informed immediately. But by this time he was down to about 100ft. and about 125-150 m.p.h. above the Northolt runway.” Aviation experts blame low cloud for the error.

The German pilot later spoke to officials at London Airport and then returned to Germany. Runway 26 is only about two-thirds as long as Runway 23 Left and is not fitted with instrument landing equipment. Three years ago a Pan American 707 pilot made the same mistake, but he actually landed at Northolt with his 41 passengers. On that occasion the 707 stopped safely with only 100 yards of runway to spare.

SCANNED IMAGE OF THE DAILY MAIL’S ARTICLE© The Daily Mail 29/4/1964

Within a week, a similar mistake was made by the pilot of a Spanish Air Force C-54, serialled T.4-10. The Daily Mail reported as follows:

Sorry, wrong airfield

A Spanish DC-4 airliner bound for Northolt Airport nearly landed in error yesterday at the privately-owned Hendon airfield eight miles away.

The pilot realised his mistake at the last minute and pulled away. A Ministry of Aviation spokesman said: “The pilot was having frequency trouble. Visibility was good and he mistook his airport. He veered off and landed at Northolt.”
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Later in the week of the Boeing incident, the same newspaper raised on its front page, some fundamental questions about aircraft safety and the cost-effectiveness of ILS facilities. These questions were raised again in the wake of the Spanish Learjet crash on 13^th August 1996 and are echoed by the debate over train protection equipment in which the Health and Safety Executive, Railtrack, Strategic Rail Authority, DETR and others are still engaged as we enter the Twenty-first Century.

TEXT OF THESE ARTICLES:

Comment

THE PERIL OF RUNWAY 26

THREE years ago a giant jetliner landed on runway 26 at Northolt in mistake for Runway 23 at London Airport (Heathrow). This week only a last-minute correction prevented it happening again. The question arises: What has been done in the meantime to prevent such a perilous error? The answer is Nothing – even though pilots have complained. The danger occurs because Runway 26 is but two-thirds the length of Runway 23. A big jet could over-run it. The one that landed in 1961 (sic) stopped a mere 100 yards from the end.

Four out of five runways at Heathrow are fitted with the Instrument Landing System (I.L.S.), which guides planes down. Runway 23 is without it, because it is used only when the wind is, infrequently, in the south-west. Pilots have to make a visual landing.

Solution

But the wind which dictates the use of Runway 23 edges aircraft towards Runway 26. They are almost identical. They are roughly parallel and only five miles apart. Both are marked by separate gas-holders. Nothing is easier than for a pilot to come out of cloud, mistake one gas-holder for the other and start to make a wrong landing. He will get a radar correction from control but, as we have seen, an error can still be made. It should be simple to do one of several things. One gas-holder could be made a different colour than the other. Large red warning signs could be painted on Runway 26.

The best solution would be to equip Runway 23 with I.L.S., which would be expensive and might not be economically justified. But it might save a disaster and the loss of lives.

THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE DAILY MAIL ALONGSIDE THIS Comment COLUMN (headline not known):

AIRLINE pilots are demanding action to close a gap in London Airport landing aids.
The aim: to avoid a repetition of Tuesday’s carbon-copy near miss by a Boeing 707 pilot. He mistook the R.A.F. airfield at Northolt for London Airport five miles away and was down to 100ft. before he realised the error. Expert analysis yesterday showed the mistake was identical with another three years ago.

In both cases it could not have happened if London Airport’s Runway 23 was equipped with a vital aid known to pilots as ILS – Instrument Landing System. The runway is the only one of five there without ILS.

Economy

It has not been installed mainly for economy reasons because the runway is in use only about 12 days in every 100 when a fresh south-west wind is blowing. The British Airline Pilots’ Association protested to the Ministry of Aviation in October 1960 after a Pan-American Boeing 707 captain mistakenly flew into Northolt. Since then the association has continually pressed the evidence of pilots who have been close to making the same mistake – like the pilot of the Lufthansa Boeing on Tuesday.

A Ministry spokesman said last night: “Action has already been taken to install an ILS on Runway 23. But owing to the legal problems of land acquisition and wayleaves for the necessary equipment, which must be outside the airport, this may take some time.”

Pilots warn that another mistaken landing could be extremely dangerous. The Northolt Runway 26 is nearly 2,000 feet shorter than Runway 23 and is well below the internationally fixed minimum for a Boeing 707 landing run. It could also be obstructed by R.A.F. planes at any time.

Landmark

As an interim measure most pilots would like to see two prominent landmarks painted different colours. They are the huge gasholders at Harrow, near Northolt, and Southall, near London Airport. They stand in almost identical positions short of the two runways. A pilot said: “It would help if they had big directional arrows painted on them – ‘Northolt’ and ‘Heathrow’.”

How does a pilot mistake London Airport’s vast landscape for the comparatively small green patch of Northolt? For the two Boeing 707 pilots who have done it the pattern seems to be exactly the same. Both flew into Britain under similar weather conditions: A gusting south-west wind, cloud at 2000ft., intermittent showers, visibility just over five miles.

Both flew in on a trunk airway under radar guidance from the Southern Region Control and homed over the Watford beacon where the London Approach Control takes over.

The pilots circled over Watford listening in for the voice of the London controller calling them in. The controller named Runway 23 as the one in use and gave a compass bearing to bring them down blind through the cloud to find the runway’s end. If Runway 23 had I.L.S. the pilot would keep his head down in the cockpit. An instrument on his panel would tell him whether he was lining up in the right direction and a bleeping noise in his headphones would indicate marker beacons starting about six miles out.

If it were dark or the weather bad the pilot would request a Ground Controlled Approach. But in fine weather he simply breaks through the cloud, looks around and confirms to the controller when he sees the runway ahead. This is the point at which the mistakes really began to pile up in both cases. Like Runway 23, Northolt’s Runway 26 has no I.L.S. so there is no instrument or bleeping warning in either case. The runways point in roughly the same direction and both have those eye-catching gasholders about four miles out. The London runway is used only when a south-west wind is blowing and one effect of this is to drift an airliner, coming in from Watford, behind the wrong gasholder.

London Airport Control keeps all airliners under radar surveillance as they come in – or it should. Some pilots complain that controllers are so busy they switch hurriedly to the next plane as soon as the pilot calls: “I have the runway in sight.” In both Boeing accidents the Ministry of Aviation claims its controller saw the pilot veer off in the wrong direction and called a warning. On Tuesday it worked. In October 1960 it appears not to have done because that 707 landed at Northolt.

Despite these failures, London Airport is still better than either of New York’s main airports, which have ILS on only one runway each. Another difficulty about fitting the extra ILS at London has been the crowding of radio waves in the area. So many frequencies are in use that to find two needed for the ILS somebody will have to give way or move over. It might even have to be the police radio cars.

Lufthansa said last night: “The pilot concerned in Tuesday’s mishap is making a written report to his superiors in Hamburg. This report will then be given to London Airport Control. “We cannot yet say what the pilot’s explanation is. He flew straight back to Germany.”

No doubt similar articles appeared in other national newspapers and specialist periodicals.

Thirty-three years later, the AAIB report into the Spanish Learjet crash concluded, amongst other things, that “the lack of navigation facilities at Northolt compares unfavourably with other major airfields serving the London area such as Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, London City, Luton and Biggin Hill” [Section 3(a)(xxiii)] and implied that an ILS installation at Northolt was considered by the Ministry of Defence in the mid-eighties [paragraph 1.8].

* FOOTNOTE: in 1964 magnetic north in west London was about 9 degrees west of grid north and that variation has since reduced, explaining why Runway 26 became redefined as Runway 25. The Ordnance Survey currently estimates the drift of magnetic north at about 11 minutes eastwards per annum and there are sixty minutes in a degree. The cross-reference to New York in the article above presumably related to Runways 04R/22L at John F. Kennedy and Runways 04/22 at Newark (ie. four approaches with an ILS).

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Thanks go to John Davison for compiling this report.