Jmmoric,
normally, one should have a certain expectation of what the runway and its surroundings look like. Some fields have just a single runway, some have a runway and a parallel taxiway and some others show a wide selection of parallel paved areas.
If someone is not familiar with an airfield, he will certainly read up on the field in question and get a picture of what is to be expected, what its present state is, and what all those parallel strips are used for. Paradoxically, things are more difficult if someone has often been to an airport and may be considered familiar with the field. I may assume this applies to the LH crew on the flight in question, as KTW has at least a daily flight. Without carefully sifting through all the notams on closed parking stands, grass cutting, runway construction, bird activity etc., one may well miss the fact that the active runway is no longer the northernmost paved strip on the field but has been doubled by another paved strip to the north. One will then fly any kind of (non-ILS) approach against a blinding sun, albeit in otherwise fine weather. Then the habit of landing on the northernmost strip will kick in; there may be some weird feeling in the back of the head (...was the runway always that clear of rubber marks and made of such beautiful fresh concrete?), but it is too easy to just shrug it off and continue. On a visual approach without appropriate nav setting, at such a point this error becomes rather hard to catch.
The best cure against such a mishap is to make the error blindingly obvious to the crew. Why not:
- place red (flashing?) lights in an X pattern on the runway ends (just like on the taxiway between 04L and 04R at LFMN) and/or use the same in place of the approach lighting system. Switching ON the normal approach lights on the active runway while showing such lights on a closed/inactive runway will surely help.
- declutter the NOTAMs. Often, they are presented as a mess with the really important stuff hidden among grass cutting, closed parking stands and other secondary information. One might introduce a priority tag that when attached to a NOTAM will place it right at the top of the NOTAM list for the field in question. Thus, one might group runway closures, outages of navaids, FFC downgrades and other critical information at the top and avoid it getting lost among all the other information.
- name a runway according to common principles already while it is under construction. In this case, the old runway at KTW would have been 09R/27L, while the new one would have been 09L/27R; the approach and landing clearance would have been issued accordingly and offered another clue.