On the list of awkward and embarrassing occurrences, somewhere slightly above calling someone the wrong name and dialing the wrong number, you'll find landing an airplane full of people at the wrong airport.
This was the case Sunday evening when a Southwest Airlines flight bound for Branson Airport in southwest Missouri accidentally landed at a much smaller airport seven miles away. It also happened less than two months ago when a massive Boeing 747 Dreamlifter landed at a small Wichita, Kan., airport instead of an Air Force base about 10 miles away.
As it turns out, this isn't a new phenomenon.
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"This is not actually as rare of an occurrence as one might think. There's actually been an, unfortunately, fairly long history of this happening," said Jol Silversmith, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who specializes in aviation and compiled a list of more than 88 incidents in which an airplane landed at the wrong airport, dating back to 1950.
Modern technology has not abated the problem as one might expect. More than 20 of the confirmed landings on Silversmith's list have occurred since 2000. He pointed to "human error" as the most common cause for these incidents, of which he said even experienced pilots are sometimes guilty.
In fact, these "oops" landings happen most often when two airfields are located close to each other, and the pilot simply relies on what he or she sees outside the cockpit window, rather than instruments and charts.
The map below shows the missed airport landings on Silversmith's list that have occurred since 2010. The green markers indicate where the planes were scheduled to touch down, and the red dots mark where they actually landed.

"It's easy to treat it as a little bit of a humorous mistake, but it is a very real safety issue," Silversmith said.
In all his research, Silversmith said he found just one instance that one of these landings led to a fatality. In December 1953, a U.S. Air Force B-29 bound for a base in Utah mistakenly landed at a municipal airport, leading to the death of one of the eight crew members.
Laura Brown, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs for the Federal Aviation Administration, told Mashable that the agency is currently investigating Southwest's landing in Missouri, but she declined to provide insight on past incidents.
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