Airliner Lands In Wrong Country

WASHINGTON - A Northwest Airlines jumbo jet, bound for Germany from Detroit, landed by mistake in Belgium early last month, and the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating how European air traffic controllers misdirected the plane and why the crew failed to notice until just before landing.

The investigation into how the Frankfurt-bound plane landed 200 miles away in Brussels so far has traced a trail of missed opportunities to redirect the flight, including the reluctance of flight attendants to contact the cockpit crew when they and the 241 passengers clearly saw the path the plane was taking on electronic map displays in the cabin.

"The only people on that plane who didn't know where they were were the three guys up front," an aviation-industry source close to the investigation said.

Aviation is replete with stories of pilots landing at the wrong airport when two airports are adjacent or at least nearby. But aviation safety officials said they were unaware of a mistaken landing at airports so far apart.

The plane, which never was in any danger, was continually under the direction of controllers who were guiding it to a normal landing at Brussels.

Sandra Allen, an FAA spokeswoman, said the FAA's office in Brussels is working with European authorities to determine what happened.

Northwest spokesman John Austin said the captain, first officer and flight engineer have been grounded pending the outcome of the

investigation, including a 30-year veteran captain with an otherwise spotless record. Austin said that no matter what mistakes controllers might have made, the crew had ultimate responsibility for the flight.

"These guys had a responsibility to know where they are," he said.

The Sept. 5 incident began when a controller at Shannon, Ireland, for some reason changed Flight 52's destination in the air traffic control computer. Sources close to the investigation said the action could not have been done inadvertently because someone would have had to type in the new destination. It is unclear, however, why a controller did so. It is possible that a controller concluded the flight had been mislabeled in the computer to begin with, sources said.

Air traffic computers across Europe then accepted the error as each country's air traffic computer electronically accepted the assertion that the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 was supposed to go to Brussels.

Meanwhile, the experienced crew failed to follow procedure, which calls for crews to routinely cross-check their location on cockpit navigation instruments. The crew had no visual cues because of a cloud cover.

Then came another bizarre twist. The crew made contact with who it thought were Frankfurt controllers, and several times addressed the controllers as "Frankfurt approach." The Brussels controllers never corrected them.

Passengers and flight attendants, meanwhile, could see their location on an electronic map display in the cabin, installed by Northwest to keep passengers updated on the flight's progress and to point out features on the ground.

Sources said flight attendants became disturbed by the increasingly clear change of flight plan, sources said, and some of them speculated that the plane had been hijacked. Then, when it became clear that the plane was landing, the flight attendants decided not to contact the crew because of the rule that forbids disturbing the crew on approach to landing except in an emergency.

Breaking through the clouds, the crew saw for the first time the geography of the area and the layout of the airport, and realized it was not Frankfurt. The captain decided to complete the landing rather than go around and head for Frankfurt.

"It was the right decision," an investigator said. "He did the safe thing."

The crew notified Northwest's Frankfurt office and was relieved of duty immediately. Another crew was flown in from Frankfurt, and the passengers arrived in Frankfurt about seven hours late.

The grounded personnel will remain so until the FAA and Northwest complete investigations and determine disciplinary action, ranging from a reprimand to dismissal.

The plane's misdirection was reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspaper, but received little notice elsewhere. Most of the aviation community was unaware of it until word of the incident became the talk of a meeting of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators in Seattle last week.

Many of the investigators agreed that the case will become a classic human-factors teaching tool, but they also expressed concern that an air-traffic control system could fail so badly because of one mistake.