In a constant aspect landings runway length 800m vs 3km should not matter but a glance on the altimeter will show a circuit hight of 4000ft !!!
Not long after I qualified, I landed at Fairford thinking it was Kemble. I learnt about confirmation bias from that one. Also, I won the club dipstick (a chromed and mounted item from a Gipsy Major) at the annual dinner, my only flying prize. Since then I have acquired GNSS kit and learnt that using all available navaids is not cheating.
I once had a day where I landed at a different airfield that I was talking to, but it was the one I intended to land on. I also landed the wrong way….
My destination had a runway runway aligned 08-26, another one in the general vicinity had runway 10-28. I checked in on frequency, was told – with rather poor reception – “crackle run mumble eight”, and proceeded to land on 08, only to be a bit surprised when an aircraft lined up the opposite direction after I taxied off the runway.
Turns out, I had dialled the wrong frequency and spoken to the other airfield, which was operating from *2*8, and “heard” what I expected to hear, rather than what was actually said, and the quality was poor because the other airport was somewhat further away…
I figured that one out after talking to a FISO who was quite relaxed about it, we called the other airfield on the phone so they wouldn’t wonder any longer where on earth I was.
I’ve almost landed at villacoublay (French Air Force) instead of toussus LFPN. Got GPS after that :)
It’s not just GA pilots doing this – just do a google search for “airliner lands at wrong airport” (which includes things like the Southwest 737 full of passengers landing on a runway that was only about 3,500 feet long)
There’s also Military landing at the wrong airport (civilian)
alioth wrote:
It’s not just GA pilots doing this – just do a google search for “airliner lands at wrong airport” (which includes things like the Southwest 737 full of passengers landing on a runway that was only about 3,500 feet long)
That one was really big, they even invented a name for it in human factors: “geographic disorientation” so not to be mistaken with “low level navigation error” 
http://www.thirdamendment.com/WrongWay.pdf
https://www.flightsafety.org/ap/ap_mar88.pdf
Lot of it happens pre-GPS confusing Gatwick/NorthHolt with Heathrow, while in the recent ones some has been picked by passengers once they switched on their phones
For those who are almost at destination, you still have two extra catches: taxiways and nearby motorway
I always had the impression it will never happen to me until I was speaking to the wrong FISO (Esltree) to land at the right airfield (Duxford), which made me think I am about to land in the wrong airport (Cambridge). I departed from Elstree, so AFIS was not surprised for me to call downwind and did not correct the chain of error…
All of it happened because of inadvertent COM switch after joining downwind and the overwhelming confusion from radio calls in early days…
