In an op-ed on CNN.com , Robert Goyer suggested that it is easy to accidentally land an airplane at the wrong airport . And he is correct . The problem is that it should n't be , especially not with the profusion of technology at a pilot 's fingertips designed to help prevent just these kinds of mistakes . No doubt Southwest 's landing at the wrong Missouri airport this week will be categorized as pilot error , as it was when a 747 crew landed at the wrong airport in Kansas in November . But labeling this all as an easy mistake or as pilot error is too simplistic . In doing so , we risk ignoring a growing threat to this nation 's and the world 's aviation safety , a growing disconnect between the technology created by our smartest engineers and technicians and the pilots who use it . Indeed , pilots sometimes ignore the technology , as Goyer and others have speculated could have been the case in the Southwest landing , while others are overwhelmed when the technology unexpectedly fails , like it did aboard the doomed Air France Flight 447 that crashed in the ocean in 2009 . America is good at fixing problems , though . When an airliner flying in the clouds on approach to Washington struck the top of a hill after descending too low , U.S. industry developed a fix : a ground proximity warning system , a talking cockpit box that alerts pilots to approaching hazards they could n't easily see . But in 2012 , a Russian airline crew demonstrating a new jet received a terrain warning -- an aural cockpit signal warning the crew they were too close to the ground -- flying around Indonesia , but ignored it , believing it was a computer error . All 44 people aboard that aircraft died when the airplane struck the side of a mountain . The computer 's warning had been real . In February 2009 , the captain of a Continental Airlines turboprop became confused when the autopilot of his airplane turned itself off while the airplane was slowing for the approach to Buffalo , New York . The pilot was so startled by the computer shutdown that he made a fatal flying mistake . He also believed the computer 's messages were a mistake . Forty-nine people in that airplane died because the pilot was wrong . All these aircraft were equipped with the latest technologies available to make flight as safe as humanly possible . And yet each time , the crew managed to figure out a way not to heed the warnings . The Southwest and the Atlas Air pilots -- and their passengers , of course -- were just lucky no one was hurt . But what about the next time ? The Southwest crew only averted disaster by a few hundred feet , narrowly missing a drop-off at the end of the runway that would surely have broken the airplane into many pieces . All these problems point to this newest threat : Pilot 's confusion about what their computers are telling them , when they look at them , that is . This speaks to complacency to some extent . It 's also well known that humans do n't handle monitoring duties very well for very long . We grow bored rather easily . But even labeling this a `` human factors '' problem is too easy . Like everything in our society these days , this complacency , this disconnect between operator and computer , is not a simple black and white problem that we can fix with another electronic box or an enthusiastic chat from the boss . There 's another overriding problem preventing us from digging deeply enough into the implications of this problem : The airline industry has become a victim of its own success , with an impressive air safety record . Before last year 's crashes in San Francisco and Birmingham , Alabama , there had been not a single fatality between 2010 and 2012 . Because our record has been so good , many people inside and outside the industry , as well as legislators , regulators and certainly airline passengers may mistakenly believe that we 've solved the aviation safety problem . But just as hospital administrators would never tell patients that losing a few people now and again to infection should be considered an acceptable loss , we ca n't ignore the instances when something has come between our professional pilots and these technologies created to help save us from ourselves . And we in the industry are only now coming to believe this threat is real ourselves . A recent study delivered to the FAA about automation confusion highlights some of these problems , but offered no timeline to solve them . Passengers also need to advocate for their own safety by writing to their legislators , airline CEOs and regulators demanding that the automation confusion issue be put on the front burner now . Like our pilots , aviation safety 's threats are sending us warning messages . But right now we do n't seem to be listening .
Robert Mark : Writer suggested it 's easy to land jet at wrong time . True , with a twist . Southwest Airlines joins similar cases from recent years . These should raise alarm , he says . He says pilots often failed to heed what computer was telling them . Complacency a threat . Mark : He should demand ` ` automation ' '' be put on the ' front - burner .