Originally Posted by
Ambient Sheep
Oh indeed, but it seems to me that over those five months the nature of the construction and the number of lights used and/or their position and/or direction may well have changed, possibly rendering that assumption invalid.
And we do have the evidence of the previous flight who said that on that particular night they had found the construction lights far too bright and as a result had found locating the runway difficult.
I'll freely confess that -- just as you haven't had time to read the newest part of this thread -- I haven't had time to go through the whole docket yet, but according to this recent post, they DID read the NOTAM:
Oh I have no wish to exonerate the crew. From my humble position it seems clear to me that they screwed up pretty badly as mentioned above, not least leaving it far too late to go-around. However it does now seem that they were not entirely to blame due to various issues at SFO, and it's best that those are understood by all concerned.
I'd be interested to know whether any rules were in place about the management of construction lights on 28L. The lighting log attached to the report suggests that normal runway lighting was switched off, so I assume that the construction work was making use of standalone lights. I'm thinking these would be pretty powerful and also fairly directional? When driving a car, it's certainly possible to be blinded by an oncoming vehicle that's briefly in a bad position, so I imagine the same problem could occur with construction lights and moving aircraft? Is it naive of me to assume that construction teams would have been instructed on this and would have rules to follow?