This literally could have been one of the worst accidents in American aviation history had the pilots of the landing airplane failed to react in time. There were 4 fully loaded and fueled passenger jets directly ahead of them.
The final NTSB report will probably calculate this, but I'm guessing if they had waited another second or two before shoving those throttles forwards they would have hit a plane (or three).
Whats even more scary, is I get the impression that the pilots only shoved the throttles forwards because the tower told them to abort.
Driving school treats people like idiots by default.
Professional training assumes people have the capacity to evaluate situations and make their own decisions on the appropriate course of action.
Comparing training intended for the general public and training for professionals is very much a stretch IMO.
o At 2356:04 PDT, ACA759 reappeared on the local controller’s ASDE-X/ASSC display as it passed over the first airplane positioned on taxiway C.
o About 2.5 seconds after advancing the thrust levers, the minimum altitude recorded on the FDR was 59 ft agl.
o At 2356:10 PDT, the local controller directed ACA759 to go around. The airplane had already begun to climb at this point (see figure 4).
This means that if they hadn't acted until they heard from the tower, it would have almost certainly been a disaster.
This kind of information is important for determining the available safety margin and the proper changes to recommend in order to prevent similar incidents in the future.
This incident as well as the previous ones shows that pilots need better support in these conditions. Lots of airports are set up with multiple parallel runway configs. It wouldn't be all that difficult to add computer driven confirmations of the runway an aircraft is approaching on. Given the frequency of these incidents as well as the cost of the consequences it seems like a reasonable addition. Such an addition won't end the problem, but will add another safety catch.
The problem with these things is how do they interact: what do you do in the cockpit when several alarms are going off at the same time? Just adding "one more alert" seems easy but... This is actually a deep problem with automation, how do the parts interact. When writing software this is a constant battle, between modularity and connection.
Information overload in the cockpit is a very real thing, particularly in an already task-saturated time like the landing approach. It's entirely unclear that adding yet another alert chime requiring the pilot's attention would help anything.
[0] https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/545578 , see SurfaceWatch at the bottom.