We're All In This Together

Landing at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is an amazing experience. It's one of those rare places when, as you look out the window on approach, you realize there's no place else in the world you could possibly be. A number of years ago, a major airline's transatlantic flight from the U.S. was scheduled to land at Frankfurt, Germany, well to the northeast. Somewhere over the ocean, air traffic control made a critical error and vectored the huge jetliner to Amsterdam. The pilots failed to do any backup navigating and didn't catch the mistake. Back in the cabin passengers and attendants watched perplexed on the little tv monitors that showed their steady progress toward not just the wrong airport, not just the wrong city, but the wrong country. It wasn't until the plane broke through the cloud cover on final approach with what they thought was their destination runway ahead that the pilots saw the dike holding back the north sea, and the flat landscape dotted with windmills. Whoops. That's what happens when the people in charge put all their trust in flawed intelligence.