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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

In the early 1960s, a 707 landing at Heathrow mistook a nearby WW2 airfield for Heathrow(!). How the pilot[1] got the 707 stopped on that short field is a miracle. But the problem was getting it off the ground again, the runway was too short.

They stripped everything out of the aircraft - seats, galleys, everything. Then put in just enough gas to hop over the hedges to Heathrow. They barely made it.

[1] The pilot was cashiered.

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I didn't know what cashiered meant.

> Cashiering (or degradation ceremony), generally within military forces, is a ritual dismissal of an individual from some position of responsibility for a breach of discipline.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashiering

Same thing happened at Hanksville, Utah, in the 1950s or 60s, except not because of pilot error. They had a strip there that was a designated emergency strip for the LA-Chicago route, and a plane (707, I think?) had to use it. And it landed OK. But, even once they got the plane fixed, taking off was problematic.

They bussed off the passengers (and luggage), took out the seats, put on enough fuel to reach Grand Junction, and managed to get it airborne.

This was a big enough deal in Hanksville that they closed school so that all the kids could come down and see the big plane.

Details are slightly unreliable - my parents told me about it when I was a kid; I have no independent information.

> This was a big enough deal in Hanksville that they closed school so that all the kids could come down and see the big plane.

You just reminded me of the book, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel.

Thanks for that!

Same thing happened in 2000 at Bryce Canyon Airport just up the road!

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2000/oct/06/american-airlines-f...

Some more detail: https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-707-raf-northolt/

Wow, I thought that was a long-forgotten incident. My dad (USAF) was stationed nearby when it happened, and he told me about it years later (with a big laugh about it, the story must have made the rounds at the office). I'm glad my memory of the story correlates with the facts.

The article makes it sound like the ferry mission wasn't quite as tight as you suggested ("barely made it"):

"As a precaution, the main A40 trunk road, which runs past the bottom of the easterly end of the runway at Northolt, was closed to traffic until the Boeing 707 had taken off. However, much lighter without much of its interior, the aircraft was airborne quickly off the Northolt runway and successfully landed at Heathrow a few minutes later."

Similar event nearly occurred in 1986 Los Angeles: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-04-me-24546-...

I'm glad we have GPS now!

Even with GPS, stuff like this still happens: https://simpleflying.com/boeing-747-dreamlifter-wrong-airpor...

Here's one from 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Saha_Airlines_Boeing_707_...

What happened isn't so surprising if you check the location of the air base in relation to the airport

And this USAF C-17 Globemaster in 2012 in Florida: https://www.flyingmag.com/news-cause-c-17-landing-too-small-...

Similar things happened on military aircraft too: I remember ~2yrs ago a gigantic C-17 mistaken a tiny airport near San Fransisco as an AF base located not far away.

And then there’s 747 Dreamlifter in 2013[1].

[1] https://simpleflying.com/boeing-747-dreamlifter-wrong-airpor...

A plane that made an emergency landing on an Irish racecource had to have a runway built for it so it could take off:

https://www.rte.ie/archives/2018/0521/965058-mexican-lands-p...

A similar but more recent (and on-topic) occurrence when a Tu-154 landed on disused airstrip in Izhma and had to be recovered in a similar fashion by a test pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_KOktzoKfU

Probably also waited for the winds to be strong in just the right direction (against the aircraft) for max lift.

Couldn't they just drive it to Heathrow?

Eyeballing it with Google areal view (I appreciate what it looks like today may not be what it looked like at the time), I think you'd have to demolish several entire streets of houses and/or some bridges to do that.

And these are London streets, not American ones, so it might still not fit: https://maps.app.goo.gl/eerQMHDv2gXLdu5D7?g_st=ic

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