A long-time maintenance worker at Toronto/Pearson International Airport was distracted by thoughts of an upcoming runway painting job when he drove a maintenance vehicle onto the displaced threshold of an active runway as a Boeing 737 was on short final approach, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) says.
A controller in the airport traffic control tower observed the runway incursion in progress and told the Air Canada flight crew to go around. The crew complied, followed instructions to rejoin the approach and landed the airplane shortly after midnight on Oct. 15, 2022. No one was injured in the incident, and the airplane was not damaged.
In its final report, the TSB said that among the incident’s causes and contributing factors was the driver’s attention, which was “split between his driving duties and the planning of the upcoming painting tasks that he would be supervising. As a result, he was paying less attention to monitoring the route for haza…
