Now with the airport circled in blue. The runways are the dark areas and the distance is about 12NM.
Below, same airport, same night, but lined up with the runway and at a distance of a couple of miles.
This next one is Sydney. There are three runways top/centre of the picture. Two parallel roughly lined up with the camera and another running across horizontally.
And the same but with the runways highlighted in blue.
They aren’t great examples, mainly because there aren’t many times I’m able to take photos, but I hope they demonstrate that it really can be hard to see what is what until you’re in the slot.
To put some time to it, the first two pics from 12 miles out are about 4 minutes from touchdown at typical jet speeds. The third pic is about 45-60 seconds from touchdown. Which is when the taxiways (or unlit closed runways :eek:) are just becoming individually identifiable.
If you’ve got to have a collision, doing it at ~10 knots at zero altitude is definitely the best place. During evening rush-hour at JFK, not so much.
As the article says, that’s gonna be an expensive repair on the 757.
The connection to the rest of thread is pretty tenuous, other than the punchline being that moving large machines in dense constricted spaces has many different ways to go wrong.
A couple months ago the FAA released what they call a “Safety Alert for Operators” or “SAFO” about this wrong-runway close call in San Francisco. SAFOs are docs aimed at the airlines (or other commercial aircraft operators) and are official finger-waggings that call attention to something the FAA thinks the industry is doing dumbly. They are not regulatory, but a smart pilot management department will make sure any recommendations get promptly incorporated in refresher training.
The actual contents of this one are pretty weak. Pretty much Mom and Apple pie: Look out the window, use all your available tools, and ask questions when things seem even a little off-kilter.
This kind of thing sort of grinds my gears. It’s basically just a rundown of best practices we already know and do. While it’s good to be reminded of them occasionally, I think in doing so the FAA sometimes ignores systemic problems that are really the basis of the issue.
Using a different example, take runway incursions. A few years ago the FAA got fed up with all the aircraft, vehicles and persons ending up on the wrong pieces of pavement. Some of the changes they made were good, I think. Changing the lead up taxiway markings, for example. But a lot of them were a band-aid on the real problem, which is: **taxiway markings are poorly thought-out in general, and should be changed completely. **
I first came to this conviction when taxiing around JFK. My first time there I had to taxi across the whole airport and encountered a number of branching taxiways. The signs look like the one on MASH saying New York that way, Hong Kong that-a-way in every direction. Very confusing. Also noticed over time how often crews get it wrong. The tower there seems to expect it and treat it as normal, sometimes.
To me, that signifies the signage system we have sucks. One could claim they’re as complex as they need to be because JFK is complex real estate. But I’m a silly idealist and I have to believe there’s a better way. But I am doubtful the FAA would change such a long standing system even if they could get ICAO to go along with it.
