Landing incidents raise US regulators concerns

[DALLAS] The wrong-airport landing by Southwest Airlines, the second incident in two months by US carriers, is heightening regulators' concerns that pilots are missing obvious visual and instrument cues while failing to check each other's work.

Lack of monitoring has been identified as an issue in the July 6 crash of an Asiana Airlines plane in San Francisco that killed three. An Atlas Air Worldwide jumbo-jet freighter used a municipal airport instead of McConnell Air Force Base on Nov 20 in Wichita, Kansas.

Pilots of the Southwest Boeing 737-700 that landed after dark on Sunday on a Branson, Missouri, county runway would have had multiple indications that they weren't at their intended destination about 11 kilometres away. They had to slam on the brakes to avoid going over an embankment at the end of a strip barely half the length of the one at their intended destination.