Hi Sunamer … Thanks once again. You are quite right! I wasn’t paying very much attention to the B747’s final approach altitude until the B737 had reached a critical point in taxiing onto the takeoff runway. Because of your comments, I’ve again reviewed the clip and this time I focused on the B747 image from the initiation of the clip. You are more than correct! Watching that approach again, focusing on the entire flight path from the initiation of the clip, it appears that the B747 descended to a point well below a desired descent path, and climbed back to the original descending flight path to land. Once again achieving the “proper” descent flight path, it can be seen initiating another decent. Just after re-initiating the descent, it appears to level off ... and then again reinitiate the descent - indicating the likelihood that someone in the cockpit had again realized the flight path was not correct. After a very short time, once again, someone apparently recognized something improper … OR … they noticed the B737 taking the runway … and, for one reason or the other, they decided to execute a go-around. It’s hard to know for sure why the go-around was initiated.
Additionally, when viewing the B747’s flight path during the missed approach, someone could be convinced that the approach path was indeed for Runwy24 Right – strictly because of the apparent position of the airplane during the initial stages of the missed approach that are shown over the airport/runway complex in the clip. However, presuming that the animation was constructed correctly in all aspects (left-right; forward-aft; up-down; including the shadows), as the B737 taxis out, the nose gear position is directly in the middle of the shadow of the fuselage, indicating that the shadow is directly under the airplane. AS the B747 goes around over the boundary, its shadow is aligned with the right edge of Runway24 Left … immediately to the right of the B737, and as it climbs out, it apparently continues to drift over to the right - where it should have been throughout the approach.
So … after a whole series of “screw-ups” by that B747 crew … this certainly could have been another SFO … but was very narrowly averted!