Alaska Airlines Flight 27
Boeing 737 990ER · Incident: wrong surface or wrong airport during landing
From Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD) to Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)
Event
- NTSB case
- DCA16IA036
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Boeing 737 990ER
- Aircraft type
- Boeing 737
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N477AS
- Operator
- Alaska Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Chicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD), Chicago, ILTo Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA), Seattle, WA
- Aircraft age
- Built the same year (2015)
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 121: Air Carrier
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Wrong surface or wrong airport
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight crew inadvertently landed on a taxiway that ran parallel to the intended landing runway. About 5 miles from the runway and having been cleared to land on runway 16R, the tower controller asked if the flight would like to sidestep to runway 16C which had recently opened. The flight crew accepted and visually lined up with taxiway T, instead of the intended landing runway 16C. Although visual meteorological conditions were present, the sun was reflecting off taxiway T resulting in the flight crew visually focusing on it during landing. The flight crew and controller did not recognize the error until after landing.
Probable cause
the flight crew's misidentification of the taxiway as the landing runway.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DCA16IA036
- Event ID
- 20151223X30310
- Case number
- DCA16IA036
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 35493da866924d8fd72f9eb21730d4e9ac6509cb1ccb6a7cf265554d194f7e2c; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:03:04.152Z.