That's a National 727 sitting in about 13' of water in the middle of Pensacola Bay. I use to be an air traffic controller and my crew was working that night. The ILS Runway 16, 8000' was closed for resurfacing. All we had available was a surveillance or ASR approach, which is a controller giving direction and headings and recommended altitudes. Our other runway was 9/27 and was about 5700', not a lot of room and approach to the west on Runway 27 was over Pensacola Bay and the last mile or so was over land and houses.
It was pouring rain, bad IFR and my crew was working but I was on another sector. With an ASR approach you put the aircraft on a discrete frequency, which we did all the time since we ran GCA's (ground controlled approach) into Navy Pensacola all day. However in this scenario one of us was going to handle the final and not a Navy controller sitting 9 miles away. Normal IFR approaches by civilian pilots are normally performed by using an ILS (Instrument Landing System). The controller only heads the aircraft towards the approach and once the pilot is cleared, he assumes his own navigation to the runway via electronic methods.
After the aircraft was set up on semi-final and was a minimum descent altitude of 1600 feet, he was handed off to a final controller who at 5 miles tells the pilot to descent to our MDA (minimum descent altitude) which in this case an ASR approach to Runway 27 is 520'. The pilot descending in heavy rain over a black bay mistook barge lights for airports lights and busted his MDA. With gear down and flaps he made a perfect landing on the bay and didn't know he was in the water under he felt water rushing in.
Needless to say, those two pilots were fired by National. This took place about 1979, National has since gone out of business along with Eastern Airlines, Air Florida and a lot of others that use to service my state. That plane was lifted by a crane and placed on a barge and was resold for $1 million dollars since it was pretty much intact. The accident resulted in only the death of 3 people who drown. Most of the passengers were saved by the barge that the same barge the pilots mistook for the airport. Had they tried this about a mile later they would of impacted about a 100' cliff that surrounds Pensacola bay on the city side. The airport sits about 120' above sea level. This happened about 40 years ago and I haven't really thought about it much, so this is sort of neat for me to relive this somewhat.