The Gorilla in the human factors research video is also totally impossible to miss unless your brain is told to focus its attention on something else. You will have to accept that when attentional tunneling occurs you will miss things that are in plain sight even those things that can be seen for miles on a clear night.
Yes but; NOTAM said that 28L was closed and approach light were off. Therefore you land on 28R which has all the usual lights. You should not have focus on landing on the right most set of lights that you see. The airport chart shows 28L - 28R - taxiway. You read the NOTAMS and construct a picture in your mind that 28R is the left most set of lights you will see. Indeed you will see only 2 sets of lights, and they will be very different. There will be only 1 set of approach lights and one set of white runway lights. That's the one that is open for use.
I'm beginning to think the gorilla comparison is not apples & apples. It is a scenario of complicated multi-item moving targets that you've never seen before. If there were strobe lead-in lights, and the a/c was on auto flight, and the crew had been instructed to count how many strobe flashes there were in 2 mins, I can almost guarantee they would not see the regional jet lining up ahead of them; especially at night. But this was not the scenario.
When the crew have been debriefed, which must have happened already, we might learn if this was a case of failing in the 6P's when planning the arrival into SFO.
Last edited by RAT 5; 27th Jul 2017 at 14:58.