nightsails

Here is a nice write up about this airport, this incident is covered at the end of the article. Imagine being one of the passengers and having to wait until they could get you out of the plane! http://cni.pmgnews.com/component/content/article?id=57722 "Still, the event that the airport is most remembered for is the accidental landing on Aug. 12, 1962, of a United Airlines DC-8, coming from Chicago. The pilot, Capt. S.R. Whipple, mistook the lights of the Troutdale airport for Portland and by the time he realized his mistake, was committed and had to land on Troutdale's 4,630-foot runaway, a feat that experts had believed couldn't be done. Whipple stopped his craft three-quarters of the way down the runway and told his 81 passengers, 'We have inadvertently landed at the Troutdale airport.' In a 1978 Outlook interview, Les Meyer, the airport manager, said he threw on clothes and rode out on the airport fire truck to meet the giant plane. The worst problem, Meyer said later, was waiting for a ramp to come from Portland to get passengers off the plane. The next day, two test pilots came to fly the plane out. Drained of most of its fuel, it lifted off the runway halfway down and took off on its tail. Whipple did return to flying, retiring two years later. Ironically, he had been the third pilot to land a DC-3 there in 1948 during the flood conditions. And he was the first to land a DC-8 there."