Originally Posted by
Ambient Sheep
You may therefore have missed the following:
May I thus venture to suggest that the actual situation as seen through the cockpit window on that particular night may not have tallied with the "sim program screencap" -- 28L not dark, and red-X drowned out by construction floodlights perhaps?
I made the assumption that during the previous five months the runway was closed, the situation must not have created undue problems for the thousands of flights that had landed without mistaking the taxiway for the runway.
The closed runway was the subject of a NOTAM and was mentioned in the ATIS broadcast. In spite of this, the crew made no mention of that fact during the approach briefing. While some look for reasons to exonerate the crew from blame, it seems to me they ignored several opportunities to recognize the approach required a bit more attention than they gave it.