ATC clears pilot to land where there is no airport

Our friend Austin Meyer wrote/invented this. It may have saved his life? I was fortunate to participate in some of his bata testing near Columbia, SC

Watch An iPad Land An Airplane [Exclusive] | Popular Science

That's Austin in the left seat.

 

The controller was relying on memory. There had been a landing strip there for 60 years as part of the Grumman plant. The problem is that the plant closed and the strip has since been developed into an industrial park. From the sight of the crash the supposed runway couldn't have been more then a 1/4 of a mile, but I'm sure he saw nothing but buildings. Very unfortunate.

 

I'm sure the controller feels horrible. Bad deal all around.

 

I used to work at that plant. When I left in 1993, the runway had been closed for several years but it was still mostly intact, aside from some condos built on the southern end. Over the ensuing years, more and more of the runway disappeared under industrial construction, and the last vestige - the extreme north end - was bulldozed about 5 years ago. On my last visit to L.I., I drove down the road through the industrial park on what had been the approximate runway centerline, and it felt downright strange! It's odd that a controller would not have known that the runway was long gone.

 

Kind of sounds like the airport was still on his scope overlay. The way he was calling the aircraft's position in relation to the runway couldn't have been from memory. He was looking at something. The FAA busts pilots for out of date charts...maybe they should be busting themselves more often.