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

[Ian W]

Originally Posted by peekay4

Why should there be a limit?

The controller was already there, and in his own judgement, if he wasn't doing other tasks he might have been able to detect that the aircraft was lined up on the wrong runway.

Why not support him by:

1. Not putting him on a schedule resulting in 2 hours of sleep in 24 hours on the backside of his circadian rhythm
2. Making available a second controller to share his workload, per FAA guidelines
3. Giving him time & space to observe critical phases of flight, instead of doing admin tasks
4. Providing additional tools / technology to detect wrong runway incursions

49 people perished on that crash. If another set of eyeballs had a chance to prevent the accident, why not take advantage of that?

I don't know how much time you have spent in the visual control tower at night, but it is not easy sometimes to even see an aircraft let alone be certain where it actually is on closely located runways.

But let's assume that the controller was actually supported and only doing visual control. The aircraft taxies to the far end of the airport and calls for takeoff in a position that could be either runway an unlit extra narrow GA runway with a divergent heading or a fully lit standard runway.
The aircraft is cleared takeoff.

I am watching carefully and it seems to be slower than normal on the take off as its angle is not changing so fast after about 15 seconds I think that the aircraft can't be on the active runway.... it could be on the GA runway.

Now - the controller has a VERY difficult choice - one that I am sure you have never had to make.
IFF the controller tells the crew you are on the wrong runway abort takeoff - the aircraft is likely to overrun the end of the runway with a similar result to the crash as the cancel clearance call could be after the aircraft was committed- and the peanut gallery will be saying that they could have become airborne - the controller caused the crash
IFF the controller says nothing as the perception may be wrong - then the controller is in a worse position than now - as the crash MIGHT have been prevented if the cancel clearance call was made before the aircraft was committed (when is that on a 4000ft runway that is already too short?) and the peanut gallery would be saying the controller caused the crash

So the NTSB asked an almost impossible to answer question - could you have prevented the crash if you had been watching - and the controller correctly said - he MIGHT have been able to.

I doubt if anyone in the NTSB actually put a CRJ out on the GA runway at night to see when it would be apparent to a controller that the aircraft was actually on the GA runway not the main runway. Then with that point decide if the aircraft could have been saved after the slight delay for controller 'surprise' that the aircraft was not on 'the' runway.


This is like the Sully assessments that he should have turned back to LGA as he _might_ have made it. All very good in hindsight if every decision had been just right.