If your native country is other than the U.S. and you are scheduled to fly there, you will probably need to make the usual preparations for an international flight.

There are a variety of contributing factors that result in wrong-airport landings and a few common threads we can look out for to avoid being on the nightly news.

How often are you required to do something so quickly in your cockpit that you have no time to read your checklist, consult the crew or think? During my years as a U.S. Air Force pilot, I was fed a steady dose of what we called "bold-print" items in our checklists that had to be committed to memory.