Near miss with 5 airliners waiting for T/O on taxiway "C" in SFO!

[DingerX]

Of course, I'm dismayed by the reaction of many around the internet that this incident is either "nothing" or "something".
Technically, it's "not nothing". I say that as a qualified ontologist.

Here's the points to take home:
The crew's bodies were in that magic 2-4 AM zone, fatigued or fresh, they were at their circadian low.
Their call was classic cognitive dissonance: what they were seeing was not what they expected to see, and so they sought confirmation of what they expected to see.
They then went around successfully.

Here's what cannot be said at the moment:
*Whether the crew initiated a go-around of its own accord
The unidentified voice from UA1 cuts in immediately after AC's readback. There are three possibilities:
1. During the readback, the PF decided to go around. The information they were given did not match what they were seeing out the window.
2. When UA1 calls "They're on the taxiway", they hit that TOGA button right quick.
3. They waited for the GA instruction from the tower.

I can see any of the three scenarios happening.

*How high they were when they flew over UA1
They had to go around fairly close in, since UA1 would need to be able to recognize that they were lined up on the taxiway. UA1 would spot it before the tower did. I think I posted a few years ago when another flight finished its bad day by lining up on 28R instead of 28L, causing the aircraft about to line up on 28L to bail out onto C. In that case too, the aircraft at the end of the 28s saw it before the tower, and that makes intuitive sense.
In any case, it's not clear how high they were or where they were when this happened. Simon over at AvHerald says "100 ft and past the 'taxiway threshold'." Of course, it's his "journalistic" policy not to name sources, and he's been wrong with this fine-grained data before, so, in this case, I'll wait for the NTSB animation (since nobody's gonna be filming that).

*Whether any other action was taken to avoid collision.
I wouldn't condemn those stuck behind UA1; they had limited visibility, and there's only one Tower frequency at KSFO. The press likes to cite Tenerife, but instrumental in Tenerife was a blocked transmission. I'll also note that thankfully, everyone on frequency was more or less speaking the same language. But there's no saying from the evidence so far whether anyone did anything. Would you risk blinding the crew with your landing lights, for example?

Two other notes:

I believe that for a very brief period about a decade ago, 28R was 28C, and the taxiway was 28R for lighter aircraft.

KSFO has inaugurated a new tower since the Asiana incident, so they probably won't be operating the same old camera.