Sleeping in Airports blog

A planeful of passengers must have quite an experience this week when their pilot accidentally landed at a military airport in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The Turkish Airlines plane, which had departed from Istanbul, missed its target airport by around 17km and somehow ended up landing at the wrong airport, with 69 people on board.

An anonymous aviation official from Istanbul has confirmed the incident, but Turkish Airlines have nothing to say on the matter.

What I find most perplexing is, the plane undoubtedly had enough fuel to make the extra 17km to the passenger airport, and surely Air Traffic Control and Ground Control in the area must have noticed the plane going off-course? How did nobody alert the pilot?

After all, planes don’t generally land without being given permission… and it’s difficult to believe that a military airport would happily welcome a foreign passenger plane that it wasn’t expecting.

Strange things are afoot!