Two-pilot crew tries to land on a taxiway at SFO

by philg

Apropos of the discussion in the comments on my July 4 Harrison Ford on flying and freedom, a two-pilot airline crew nearly landed on a taxiway at SFO (Mercury News; contains audio clip from LiveATC) on Friday night. Unlike with Harrison Ford, the taxiway was not clear at the time, but contained four heavy airliners. And unlike with Ford, it was night, which arguably makes it easier to distinguish a taxiway from a runway (the runway has different colored lights (“different lights of color” in California?), more lights, and brighter lights). Of course, Harrison Ford was by himself whereas the Airbus A320 has two qualified pilots on board (not like the Miracle on the Hudson where Captain Sully was heroically single-piloting the machine!).

The recording suggests that it was another pilot who first figured out the situation, leading the Tower controller to issue a go-around instruction to Air Canada. Note that pilots are always free to go around themselves if they don’t like what they see on the runway (or taxiway!) or if they can’t get the aircraft stabilized (see the end of Asiana 214: Training with passengers in the back? for a discussion of stable approach criteria). This can be done even after the wheels touch the runway in a light airplane. With a heavy jet, absent an emergency, it should be started when the plane is still roughly 50′ above the ground and the engines are reasonably “spooled up.”

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10 thoughts on “Two-pilot crew tries to land on a taxiway at SFO”

  1. The NYT article I read left me with the impression of air traffic control functioning well after realizing a mistake had been made (and also makes me think cool! There are some things we can do right in America! Now let’s go build some nuclear power plants!). Is that a fair assessment of the situation? That we have a reasonably functional system of checks in air traffic control that can and does improve safety and avert disaster? ( Atul Gawande discusses aircraft safety in his book The Checklist Manifesto as an example of a system that works)

  2. Could barely decipher anything in the ATC recording. It would have been the biggest air disaster in history, but Canadia’s biggest triumph.

  3. Contrary to your article, you might be surprised to know that Captain Sully had a copilot!

  4. Yz: Checklists and two-pilot crews are more about the aircraft than the ATC system. Remember that checklists and two-pilot crews can be used to operate from one non-towered airport to another non-towered airport, potentially never talking to a controller.

    I’m sure that the Tower controllers at SFO are among the world’s best, just as the ones at Logan and Hanscom (our local airports) are great (though in this case, irrelevant; it was pilots who figured out the ugly situation developing). But you’re talking about a well-functioning 1950s system for manually separating human-occupied and human-piloted aircraft that happen to be cooperating. As soon as the GPS constellation was completed (1994) we should have had a system for aircraft to automatically avoid each other, even when not under ATC control. Instead we’ll have part of that in 2020 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance_%E2%80%93_broadcast ). And I don’t think that there is any contemplated mechanism to prevent drone-human-aircraft collisions.

  5. The NTSB has just released the name of the crew. The plane was piloted by Capt. Al Coholic. The Co Pilot was first officer Bud Wieser.

  7. There is no way the tower can determine if an aircraft is lined up with the runway or the taxiway on approach (night or day). However, for a pilot to not recognize a dark, blue-lighted taxiway vs a huge lighted runway is a mystery, especially if the full approach lighting system (needed for ILS approches) was turned on.

    see: https://youtu.be/O3LTYeZrzH8?t=218

  8. It sound as if the Air Canada pilot caught his own mistake (sorta) – he ask ATC if he is clear to land because he sees airplane lights “on the runway”. So he wasn’t going to land anyway, even if for the wrong reasons.

    Would he really have taken out all the aircraft on the taxiway or only the first?

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