It was about 4 a.m. on August 12, 1962, and United Air Lines Flight 861, a red-eye flight from Chicago to Portland, had just landed. The 81 passengers were unbuckling their seatbelts and peering out the windows of their big four-engine Douglas DC-8 into the pastoral darkness outside. One or two lights twinkled here and there, and the shadowy hulk of a few low buildings and pickup trucks could be seen in the distance.Inside the plane, there was a murmur of confused conversation. “This is Portland?” someone asked incredulously.Passenger Dr. Richard Gorrell of Maquoketa, Iowa, was also surprised. He knew Portland was a small city compared with Chicago. But this “small, shoddy airport,” as he phrased it, seemed too tiny for any city to be flying jet airliners in and out of. It also seemed deserted. Did they close the airport for the night in Portland, along with the deli and the grocery stores? And the landing run had seemed unusually short. The instant the plane had touched down, Gorrell had noticed, “the pilot set the brakes full on and reversed the motors. You could feel the rubber scraping off.”Then the rising murmur of baffled conversation was cut short by a rattle from the cabin loudspeakers. “Uh, ladies and gentlemen, we have inadvertently landed at Troutdale Field by mistake,” a man’s voice announced sheepishly. (Troutdale, Multnomah County; 1962) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1802a.massive-jet-lands-at-tiny-country-airport-by-mistake-481.html)