Originally Posted by
nolimitholdem
*sigh*
What breathless nonsense. In visual conditions there's no way anyone's landing on an occupied strip of pavement, night or not. ATC may have ordered a go-around but that doesn't mean the AC crew hadn't already noticed their error. If the aircraft on C were waiting to take off they would have been at the threshold end and clearly visible.
It certainly wasn't anything close to a disaster. An embarrassing, recoverable error if true, at most.
Well, the Air Canada 759 folks asked why they saw lights on the runway.
The discussion starts at about 25:40 into this clip:
http://archive-server.liveatc.net/ks...2017-0630Z.mp3
An edited transcript from the news article linked in the previous post:
AC759: "Tower, just want to confirm. This is Air Canada 759. We see lights on the runway there. Across the runway. Can you confirm are we cleared to land?"
SFO TOWER: "Confirmed cleared to land. Runway 28 Right. There's no one on 2-8 Right but you."
"Where's this guy going? He's on the taxiway," the other pilot said.
SFO TOWER: "Air Canada, go around."
AC759: "Going around. Air Canada 759."
SFO TOWER: Air Canada looks like you were lined up for Charlie there. Fly heading 280. Climb maintain 3,000."
AC759: "Heading 2-8-0, 3,000 Air Canada 759."
UA001 PILOT: "United One, Air Canada just flew directly over us."
SFO TOWER: "Yeah, I saw that."
Nothing close to a disaster? Breathless nonsense? Well, a little close for me...
AC 759 was an A320 from YYZ. The other aircraft lined up on C behind UA 1 were
PR 115, UA 863 and UA 1118. A lot of beacons.
There was a discussion on the thread about the Air Canada YHZ crash that implied that the AC A320's didn't have updated avionics. Was that a player here? Did they have a map shift that lined up perfectly with the taxiway? Obviously they knew there weren't supposed to be planes on the runway but they sure didn't seem to catch the error in time if they overflew United on the tower called go around.
Usual caveats, we mustn't speculate, a report will be out in a year or two, Harrison Ford will be called as an expert witness etc...