On July 7, 2017, an Air Canada Airbus A320, being operated as Flight 759, on final approach to San Francisco International Airport, lined up with an occupied taxiway rather than the assigned Runway 28R. The A320 descended to 60 ft above the ground and initiated a go-around after overflying the first of four airliners waiting on the taxiway for takeoff clearance.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the probable cause of the incident was the flight crew’s misidentification of Taxiway C as the intended landing runway, which resulted from the crewmembers’ lack of awareness — “due to their ineffective review” of notice to airmen (NOTAM) information before the flight and during the approach briefing — that the parallel Runway 28L was closed. Contributing to the incident, NTSB said, were the crew’s failure to tune the instrument landing system frequency for backup lateral guidance, expectation bias, fatigue, breakdown in crew resource management…
