SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

SFO: The typo that almost crashed a plane

In 2017, a commercial airliner lined up for takeoff at San Francisco International Airport on runway 01 Left, the main departure route.

The pilot accidentally punched 10 Left — a much longer SFO runway — into the cockpit computer, causing the plane to incorrectly calculate the appropriate thrust and wing flap settings.

The pilot’s simple reversing of the number caused the plane to nearly run out of runway, lifting off with only 400 feet left of asphalt, according to a Federal Aviation Administration report obtained by The Chronicle through the Freedom of Information Act.

It wasn’t the only such close call at SFO. The March 2018 FAA safety report found 25 cases from 2014 to 2017 in which airplanes from several carriers took off with less than 1,000 feet of runway remaining. The FAA believes some of those cases probably were a result of “transposition error” and said no other major airport in the United States has had a similar problem.

Aviation experts say airliners need to lift off the ground with enough runway left to abort a takeoff — 400 feet isn’t nearly enough and 1,000 feet is too close.

“Wow, that is practically the end of the runway!” retired pilot Ross Aimer, an aviation consultant familiar with SFO, said of the 2017 incident. “They were lucky they didn’t take out some of the instrument landing equipment erected at the end of that runway.”

The runway 01 error revelations are the latest issue at the airport involving its runways, taxiways and tarmac. The airport closed its busiest runway, 28L, on Sept. 7 for 20 days of repairs, leading to more than 1,000 flight delays and hundreds of cancellations. The closure was not related to the runway number issue but resulted from deteriorating concrete.

Runway 28L was also closed overnight in July 2017 for construction, contributing to a near-catastrophic botched landing. An Air Canada Airbus A320 mistook a crowded taxiway for its runway and came within 14 feet of crashing into four fully loaded planes before pulling up and narrowly averting what could have been the worst aviation disaster in history.

The aborted landing prompted a National Transportation Safety Board investigation and a Government Accountability Office report published last month saying the FAA needs to do a better job collecting and analyzing data on ground incidents. Reported runway incursions across the country nearly doubled, from 954 in fiscal year 2011 to 1,804 in 2018, according to the report.

The SFO close call also led to a three-day FAA safety visit to SFO in late February 2018. At the time, SFO had experienced four wrong-surface events involving two or more carriers during the previous year, according to the FAA report.

The agency determined that the runway 10-01 confusion was “high risk” and issued a memo in September 2018 to pilot unions and other groups to alert flight crews and airlines of the issue.

“We have not received any reports about this kind of incident occurring at SFO since 2017,” FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said. Reporting such an incident is voluntary, so it’s unclear whether the confusion remains.

SFO spokesman Doug Yakel said he believes the issue has been fixed.

Read the rest of the article for even more incidents that may give second thoughts about flying into San Francisco.

Original Submission