This is an excerpt from a report made to the Aviation Safety Reporting System. The narrative is written by the pilot, rather than FAA or NTSB officials. To maintain anonymity, many details, such as aircraft model or airport, are often scrubbed from the reports.
Aircraft 1: PA-32 Cherokee Six/Lance/Saratoga/6X
Aircraft 2: Unknown
In VMC conditions, Tower had instructed me to enter a right downwind and cleared me for Runway XXR in the downwind. I entered a base turn for XXR, missed XXR (XXR is offset about 400 feet to the south/southwest) and turned final for XXL.
Another plane had been assigned XXL. Tower asked me what I was doing and I immediately went around.
There were several factors at play that, I believe, affected missing the assigned runway: An unfamiliar airport, seeing XXL and assuming that was the correct runway, and simply not being mentally set for the turn to XXR (the offset runway).
Most of my training and flying has been at uncontrolled single runway airports. So, when I turned base, I saw XXL, very prominent, and my single runway experience kicked in. I didn’t rehearse in my mind the base turn and that I needed to be looking for the offset Runway XXR.
I believe that if I had visualized and rehearsed in my mind the pattern, I would not have missed XXR.
I realize I could have been assigned a different runway, but I do think the principle is the same. It only takes a moment to reset if I already have the picture of the airport in my mind.
So, the short of it, preparation, planning, implementation, and mental focus were lacking in this case.
Rehearsing for the flight could have been done at home at my desk or couch before ever departing.
Also, I think, too much dependency on electronic flight bag may have taken away good old fashioned mental homework. The thinking being: “How can I go wrong with all of these electronic aids?”
Yes, I forgot to mention, my instrumentation was just upgraded from primarily analog to digital.
Primary Problem: Human Factors
ACN: 1926280
The 7:23 viseo provided by pilot due says that this is not an isolated incident. There are other videos for KFCM regarding this issue, as well as other airports with offset, parallel runways. Learn from it, but don’t beat yourself up over something that better and worse pilots have also done.
Always thought a preview of runways, taxiways, and relation to where I’m parking at an unfamiliar airport was standard ground school text.
KFCM, Flying Cloud. Probably happens a LOT there. Same thing happened to me there, some years back. I almost landed on 10R–the tower sent me around at the last second. The ATIS for KFCM even warns pilots not to, uh, do what I did.
There’s an FAA video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph89HYxXL7k
Out of curiosity, I just called the ASOS at KFCM. There are many comments attached to the weather report but as far as I could tell, the parallel runway hazard is not included (a couple of words are pronounced so fast I couldn’t understand them after listening four times). However something I’ve not seen before in Skyvector.com – on the airport page, there’s a thumbnail in the left column of the video you included. Also this comment is included (at the bottom) of the Airport Remarks in the Chart Supplement: “Wrong rwy arr risk, closely aligned parl rwys”. Personally if I flew there I would request the tower to include the warning in the ASOS attached comments also.