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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

In the early 1960s, a pilot mistook a WW2 airfield for Heathrow, and landed his 707 on it, barely stopping before the end of the runway.

The runway being too short to lift a 707, mechanics stripped everything out of it they could to reduce the weight - seats, interiors, etc. They put barely enough gas in it to hop over to Heathrow, and managed to get it there safely.

The pilot who landed there was cashiered.

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A similar incident happened in 2001 (!) to TWA ("The Wrong Airport"):

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/TRAVEL/NEWS/03/15/wrong.airport/...

In the thread at http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=76657 the commenters list a few other instances of this happening.

“Cashiered”?

It means 'fired' (maybe more common in English outside the U.S.?).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cashier#English

I've lived 22 years of my life in the UK and 12 in North America and never heard of this before so I don't think it can be particularly common. I've heard of being 'laid off', 'fired', 'let go', 'terminated', 'made redundant', 'purged', but never this. Based on this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashiering it might be a military way of saying it so perhaps the poster has some background in that field.

That would make a lot of sense

That's quite possible. I feel like The Economist also uses it, but maybe they're trying to cultivate a retro aesthetic. :-)

I have never heard the usage of this word - I assumed the commenter was inventing a probably-understandable, slightly humorous usage on the fly which I've found to be a fairly common habit among ultra-intelligent people.

I’m English, tho now live in the US, and never heard of it. Appears to be pretty archaic in usage.

Interesting!

I had to look it up as well :)

Google is your friend : http://bfy.tw/ClnP

This same thing happened to a USAF C-17 recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHMhClzfoi8

Short hops for big planes happen every so often.

A few years back when SFO was closed after the Asiana crash, a lot of big planes got re-routed to Oakland, then once SFO was open again they made the hop across the Bay.

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