A Delta Air Lines jetliner with 130 passengers on board landed at the wrong airport in South Dakota on Thursday evening, said a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident.
The Delta A320 landed at Ellsworth air force base at 8.42pm Central Time on Thursday, when its scheduled destination was a nearby airport in Rapid City, NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said on Friday.
Ellsworth is about 10 miles (16km) due north of Rapid city regional airport. The two airports have runways that are oriented nearly identically to the compass, from north-west to south-east. Delta Flight 2845 had departed from Minneapolis.
A passenger interviewed by the Rapid City Journal said she and her fellow passengers waited about 2½ hours in the plane at Ellsworth, where they were ordered to pull down their window shades as armed military personnel walked through the cabin with a dog.
This was not the first time airline pilots have mistaken the air force base for the Rapid city airport. In 2004, a Northwest Airlines flight carrying 117 passengers to Rapid City landed at Ellsworth. The plane remained on the ground for more than three hours as the pilots explained to air force security officers what went wrong, and a new crew was dispatched to continue the flight to Rapid city.
Northwest and Delta merged in 2008.
Delta has contacted the passengers “and offered a gesture of apology for the inconvenience”, the airline said in a statement.
The crew has been taken off duty while NTSB investigates, the statement said. “Delta will fully cooperate with that investigation and has already begun an internal review of its own,” it added.
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