“Things were not adding up,” the Air Canada Airbus A320 captain told incident investigators as he explained his decision to break off an approach to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) just before midnight local time on July 7, 2017, as the A320 descended to 100 ft above Taxiway C, where four air carrier airplanes were awaiting takeoff clearances.
The captain and his first officer had failed to detect that they had aligned the A320 with the taxiway rather than with the parallel Runway 28R, where they had been cleared to land.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) cited as the probable cause of the incident the crew’s “misidentification of Taxiway C as the intended landing runway, which resulted from the crewmembers’ lack of awareness of the parallel runway closure due to their ineffective review of NOTAM [Notices to Airmen] information before the flight and during the approach briefing.”
Contributing factors were the flight crew’s failure to …
