This sounds like a story of how well the aviation system works more than anything. The pilot is in constant communication with the tower. The system worked as intended here and he went around.
It seems like a non story.
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a9124/what-went-wrong...
If there was fog, they wouldn't have been using 28L.
(Just a guess - not a pilot.)
Asiana wasn't a small error of judgment, it was a fundamental failure of training and over-reliance on automation which resulted in a pilot who didn't really know how to land.
What I'm getting at is that a small error can have big consequences, and that this near-miss last week by the Air Canada plane is not something that should be dismissed as a non-story just because it was spotted and rectified in time. A collision avoided at the last minute is still indicative of a problem. If the Asiana pilot had stuck the landing that day but still felt uncomfortable, their training and operation culture at that firm would still have been problematic, they would just have gotten away with it for a little longer.
We have a very rigid communication protocol that I designed based on my experience as a pilot and all the time I've spent flying with my father, who is a very experienced pilot.
The communication protocol and operational checklists are there specifically to catch human errors.
For instance: "snoop" (which is a sort of soapy water used for checking gas lines for leaks) every gas line any time it is changed. Snooping something, finding a leak, and then either reseating the gas fitting or shutting off its supply is the system working properly.
You could absolutely write an article that said "multiple gas leaks found on fire effects system", omitting the part where they were immediately found and fixed as part of the operation of the system.
I also wrote the ignition and control systems for a fire effect that we use, which has fail-safes built into every stage of its operation. That doesn't mean that failure modes don't ever occur (for instance: dead battery on the controller, out of range events, etc), it means that I designed around them so that they occur safely.
So I'm sorry that you wouldn't hire me for safety-critical systems. I'm curious what safety critical system you design or manage, because the idea that you either don't think errors will ever occur, or don't know what they are and how to design around them, is perplexing.
your basic claim here seems to be that journalists took an unremarkable everyday incident and wrote it up in sensational style to make it look bad. I don't think that's the case.