I would love to see the video that frame is taken from to watch the arc of the plane as it initiated go-around and missed a collision by just a few feet.
NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#12Previous discussion on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741605 This literally could have been one of the worst accidents in American aviation history had the pilots of the landing airplane failed to react in time. There were 4 fully loaded and fueled passenger jets directly ahead of them.
Ugly stuff. I'm glad it ended up as a miss.
This incident as well as the previous ones shows that pilots need better support in these conditions. Lots of airports are set up with multiple parallel runway configs. It wouldn't be all that difficult to add computer driven confirmations of the runway an aircraft is approaching on. Given the frequency of these incidents as well as the cost of the consequences it seems like a reasonable addition. Such an addition won't end the problem, but will add another safety catch.
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#13Maybe taxiways parallel to runways shouldn't be a thing.
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#14This was a very close call. Initial reports indicated it was like an ordinary go-around. No. "The incident pilots advanced the thrust levers when the airplane was about 85 feet above ground level. Flight data recorder data indicate the airplane was over the taxiway at this time. About 2.5 seconds after advancing the thrust levers, the minimum altitude recorded on the FDR was 59 feet above ground level." They overflew…
Something doesn't add up then, the listed elevation for SFO is 13.1 ft MSL.
http://www.airnav.com/airport/KSFO
UPDATE: tolerances around GL are 20 ft https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=&r=PART&n=...
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#15This was a very close call. Initial reports indicated it was like an ordinary go-around. No. "The incident pilots advanced the thrust levers when the airplane was about 85 feet above ground level. Flight data recorder data indicate the airplane was over the taxiway at this time. About 2.5 seconds after advancing the thrust levers, the minimum altitude recorded on the FDR was 59 feet above ground level." They overflew…
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Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#16This was a very close call. Initial reports indicated it was like an ordinary go-around. No. "The incident pilots advanced the thrust levers when the airplane was about 85 feet above ground level. Flight data recorder data indicate the airplane was over the taxiway at this time. About 2.5 seconds after advancing the thrust levers, the minimum altitude recorded on the FDR was 59 feet above ground level." They overflew…
Something doesn't add up then, the listed elevation for SFO is 13.1 ft MSL. http://www.airnav.com/airport/KSFO UPDATE: tolerances around GL are 20 ft https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=&r=PART&n=...
Also, they might not have been directly above the A340 at lowest altitude.
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#17Maybe taxiways parallel to runways shouldn't be a thing.
How do you propose to get to and from the runways?
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#18Previous discussion on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741605 This literally could have been one of the worst accidents in American aviation history had the pilots of the landing airplane failed to react in time. There were 4 fully loaded and fueled passenger jets directly ahead of them.
Ugly stuff. I'm glad it ended up as a miss. This incident as well as the previous ones shows that pilots need better support in these conditions. Lots of airports are set up with multiple parallel runway configs. It wouldn't be all that difficult to add computer driven confirmations of the runway an aircraft is approaching on. Given the frequency of these incidents as well as the cost of the consequences it seems lik…
> but will add another safety catch.
The problem with these things is how do they interact: what do you do in the cockpit when several alarms are going off at the same time? Just adding "one more alert" seems easy but... This is actually a deep problem with automation, how do the parts interact. When writing software this is a constant battle, between modularity and connection.
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#19VASAviation made a video on this with radio traffic from the incident.
Re: NTSB Issues Investigative Update on San Francisco Airport Near Miss
#20I've seen people mentioning this could be a big disaster, but I'm curious exactly what the effects could be. Specifically, ignoring the wheels for the moment, would the hull of the landing plane slide off on contact at all, or would the planes just get squashed? I have no intuition about friction / stiffness of materials at that scale. (I'm also assuming the planes were at least a little bit offset to the side)
With the wheels down, they would just tear through the hull of the lower plane, right?