New information from the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has revealed that an Air Canada Airbus 320 came dangerously close to colliding with several other aircraft at San Francisco International Airport on July 7.
Flight 759 was arriving at the airport from Toronto at 11:56 Pacific Standard Time that evening, but mistook a taxiway for the runway next to it and would have collided with four other planes awaiting takeoff clearance, had it not changed course. But the arriving plane aborted the landing after other pilots had alerted air-traffic controllers and flashed landing lights.
An update on the NTSB’s investigation of the incident, posted online on Aug. 2, stated that Flight 759 had been only about 18 metres from the ground at one point. The update included security photos of the incident, showing the Airbus preparing to land on the taxiway before initiating a go-around, along with quotations from a pilot in a United Airlines plane that was taxiing in the runway.
“Where’s this guy going?” the United pilot said to a local air-traffic controller during the incident. “He’s on the taxiway.”
“In post-incident interviews, both incident pilots stated that, during their first approach, they believed the lighted runway on their left was 28L and that they were lined up for 28R,” the NTSB wrote, referring to the runway on which the plane had been cleared to land. “They did not recall seeing aircraft on taxiway C, but that something did not look right to them.”
The update also revealed that runway 28L had been shut down due to construction and that its lights had been turned off. “Runway and approach lighting for runway 28R were on and set to default settings.”
Both pilots of the Air Canada plane were experienced pilots, the Board noted. The captain had logged more than 20,000 total flight hours, of which nearly 4,800 had been in Airbus 320s, while the first officer had flown about 10,000 total flight hours.
No cockpit voice-recorder data was available from the Air Canada aircraft, as the data had been overwritten, the NTSB stated.
The update did not provide a probable cause of the incident or an analysis of the information so far. “No conclusions regarding the cause of the incident should be made from this preliminary information,” wrote the NTSB. “NTSB investigations generally take 12 to 18 months to complete.”
The plane did not appear on radar systems used prevent runway collisions, since those systems are not designed to detect planes on taxiways, according to the update.