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Comment by dx034 | Hacker News Reader

It's likely that the controller would've seen it as well after the Air Canada pilot indicated that he saw planes on what he believed was the runway.

Even if not, the pilot would've probably aborted the landing since he saw the other aircrafts. So it was certainly a dangerous situation but I doubt that a crash would've happened without that pilot's comment (it was certainly helpful though).

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Controllers in the tower do not have a good visual perspective to see runway alignment. I don't think they would have caught this.

At night, there are many visual cues to see the runway environment - it sounds to me like this complacent pilot ignored many red flags and was about to drive his plane on top of those on the taxiway.

A big heavy airliner can't just stop its decent instantly; it's a good thing that pilot on the ground chimed in when he did.

I betcha the landing pilot won't have a job pretty soon.

But they have radar and usually extended centerlines. That should've been clearly visible for him on the screen.

Radar displays are not going to accurately display a displacement of 150m. They're set up for broader area surveillance.

Edit: here's a good example of a terminal radar display. The two parallel diagonal lines are the extended centerlines of two runways that are about 1570m apart (Athens airport, LGAV).

https://www.hvacc.gr/site/images/content/events/2003/athens-...

And that's the spacing between the runways. There is less space between the runway and the taxiway.

http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/SFO/APD/AIRPORT+DIA...

When you're descending at a rate suitable for human cargo in good weather there's plenty of room to maneuver.

A C-5 that's trying to drop out of the sky ASAP before anyone can shoot at it is a different story.

The pilot and copilot were clearly in WTF mode since there were planes on what they thought was the runway. If nobody had spoken up it would likely have gone back and fourth between them and the tower a few times ("are you sure the runway is clear?") and in all likelihood they would have caught it. If they didn't the pilots would have likely requested to go around. Backing off of what you're doing and assessing the situation when anything is not quite right is SOP in every facet of aviation.

Yeah. When reading about modern air disasters, you often hear that five different things had to go wrong at once for them to happen. In this case, one or two things went wrong, the rest of them went right, and everything was fine.

This is spot on. The strength and weakness in doing something as complex as safely landing an airliner full of people is all in the capability of the human mind to use technology. Especially in flying, I think (I did this for a career, a whole other career ago) it's easy to have everything going smoothly, then some "minor" thing be out of expectation, but hey things are going smoothly, so dismiss the minor thing because here's this other thing that does look just right, and ... and ... suddenly several mistakes have compounded.

It's sometimes harder when there's nothing impeding you at all to do everything right because the routine-ness of habit takes over. Being busy (but not overwhelmed), while more mentally and physically tiring, is sometimes easier, because you pay attention to the right things at the right time.

This is true in all manner of domains. I've never flown but I can remember a number of times I've made (fortunately relatively inconsequential) mistakes that caused me to face-palm afterwards. Why? Not so much that I made a mistake. But that I could recall clearly a number of observations that I made but dismissed because they ran counter to what I "knew" was the reality of my situation.

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