Landing at the Wrong Airport?

The two recent incidents of aircraft landing at the wrong airport in such a short time period has brought the issue to the forefront of the media.  I imagine the response on the Southwest Airlines pilots by management has been so harsh because of the large amount of media coverage the incident has gotten.  But this is not new.  I found a website that contains a long list of incidents of aircraft landing at the wrong airports, which is current enough to include the recent Southwest incident and the Dreamlifter incident late last year.  I feel bad for the pilots who make these mistakes and then come under so much scrutiny from their management and the media.

Is it justified though? The implications of such a mistake can be deadly.  The Southwest flight that landed at the wrong airport landed on a much shorter runway that ended with a cliff.  It would seem that the media have reason to be so interested in this, there was only a reported 40 feet of runway left before the drop off.  If the aircraft hadn't been able to stop on that runway for any reason, like even if it was just raining, this story would probably have ended with a large number of fatalities.

So why does this happen?  the Southwest pilots have recently been said to have been confused by the runway lighting. This seems plausible, but there are redundancies in aircraft to keep things like this from happening.  Instruments that provide a heading, GPS that provides exact position, air traffic controllers who should have the aircraft on their scopes, etc. In most cases this type of error should be inexcusable because it shouldn't happen.  Is this different? the pilots were flying a VFR approach to runway 14 at 6 p.m..  Just by sight.  The captain of the flight had never been to Branson.  The FO had been there one time during the day.  On their way to Branson, one of them called ATC and called the runway in sight.  ATC cleared them for a visual approach to the airport and the flight continued on to land at the airport they thought was Branson.  So the cause of this will likely be attributed to pilot error.  I just don't understand why ATC didn't notice the airport descending and slowing down 8 miles too short of where it was supposed to be. It would seem that there is fault on the part of ATC and the pilots.  If they had been forced to fly IFR rules because of the lack of experience with this airport, this may not have happened.  I believe this would have prevented this incident, but not likely applicable for a large number of other wrong airport landings.  Something should be done about this issue however, the list of incidents I provided earlier is too long.

As a manager you are almost forced to suspend the pilots from duty while the investigation continues.  The public would be more than a little upset if they found out that there was a pilot who was involved in a major incident still flying, especially if later it was revealed that he was incompetent or impaired in some regard.  Will they ever get their job back? not likely, but it will depend on the conclusion of the investigation.  There was reported to be a dispatcher in the cockpit as well. He was also suspended on paid leave until the investigation concludes.  I can't see how he has anything to do with this incident overall.  He wasn't the dispatcher with operational control of the flight so this didn't really make sense to me.  I hope that they find out there was nothing the pilots could have done, but I fear that most likely won't happen.