About halfway down the runway, the pilot hit the brakes in earnest. The big-footed landing gear left triple streaks of rubber.
The behemoth C-17 cargo plane that landed in error at a tiny Davis Islands airport carried within its fuselage one of the military‘s mightiest men.
But Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, holds no ill will toward the crew that screeched to a halt on a short runway with him aboard.
“The young pilot did a good job landing, albeit on the wrong strip,” Mattis said Wednesday.
Six months after the mishap shook up a residential district that flanks the Peter O. Knight Airport near downtown Tampa, the military has finally put the blame on human error, a theory espoused by civilians long ago.
The aircraft, as wide as a football field and as tall as a five-story building, was headed to MacDill on July 20.
When it instead set down at the small field on the southern tip of Davis Islands, residents could feel the vibrations and hear the roar.
Deric Dymerski, president of the company that runs ground operations at Peter O. Knight, realized right away that the pilot must have mistaken one airport for the other. It had happened before. After all, both airfields have runways oriented at the same angle.
Retired pilots immediately suspected pilot fatigue.
Civilians had their theories but the Air Mobility Command, based at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, initially confirmed none of them, not even that the incident was a mistake.
Read More: Tampa Bay Times
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