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SAN FRANCISCO — Federal aviation investigators Tuesday launched the third probe into landing mishaps at San Francisco International Airport in less than six months after an Aeromexico passenger jet was ordered to abort a landing when it lined up on the wrong runway — occupied by another commercial jet.
Aeromexico Flight 668, arriving from Mexico City around 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, was cleared to land on Runway 28R, and correctly read back that clearance to air traffic controllers, said Ian Gregor, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman. About a mile from the airport, Gregor said, controllers noticed the aircraft was instead lined up for Runway 28L, where Virgin America Airbus A320 jet was awaiting departure for Kona, Hawaii.
The tower ordered the Aeromexico Boeing 737 jet to abort the landing. It circled around and safely landed, ending the five-hour flight, Gregor said.
Data extracted from radar feeds show the Aeromexico jet dropping to as low as 250 feet and only about .69 miles from the start of the runway before increasing its altitude and veering to the left, according to FlightAware. However, the data shows the Aeromexico airplane flew directly over the Virgin America flight at about 700 feet altitude, according to data from FlightAware.
“Aeromexico 668 go around!” an air traffic controller can be heard on audio recordings reviewed by the Bay Area News Group.
Quickly, the pilot acknowledges the request to abort the landing: “Aeromexico 668 going around.”
The Aeromexico jet was approaching the airport using its instrument landing system, Gregor said. Weather conditions at SFO at the time were overcast with visibility at about 10 miles, according to weather archives.
“Aeromexico was lined up for the wrong runway,” Gregor said. “We’re looking into why that happened.”
The airline issued a brief statement Thursday morning: “Aeromexico is investigating the events [that] occurred at the San Francisco International Airport and informs that the safety of our passengers and operations was not compromised at any time.”
In July, an Air Canada flight mistook a crowded SFO taxiway for a runway, barely missing four fully loaded planes awaiting takeoff on the ground. In October, another Air Canada flight crew landed on an SFO runway despite repeated warnings by an air traffic controller to abort because he believed another airplane had not yet left the area.
The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are investigating those incidents.
After the July incident, the FAA changed certain rules at SFO, such as how pilots approach landings and how the air traffic control tower is staffed.
Gregor said the FAA looks for trends when a number of incidents happen during a short amount of time.
“However, the circumstances behind the three recent SFO events are all different,” he said. “There is no common cause or theme to them.”
Commercial pilot Shem Malmquist, who has followed the three SFO incidents, said it’s not as simple as saying the three incidents were different.
“People do not set out to make mistakes, and if it was so simple that you could just tell them ‘don’t do that’ we would not ever see an error! What we should do is look at why each human involved did something and ask, ‘Why did that make sense to that person at that time?’ ” Malmquist wrote in an email. “So, while I cannot state that there is a ‘common cause,’ (for the SFO incidents) I would say that there is a system problem here.”
In the latest FAA Runway Safety Report, from 2004-2014 SFO tallied 91 runway incursions — ranging from a serious incident where a collision was narrowly avoided to an incident that involved no immediate safety consequences. A runway incursion is an incident where an unauthorized aircraft, vehicle or person is on a runway, according to the FAA. It creates a risk that a departing or arriving airplane could collide with another aircraft.
In 2016, SFO had 53 million passengers, the 23rd busiest airport in the world. Denver International, which is a similarly sized airport serving 58.2 million passengers annually, had only 41 runway incursions. However, McCarran International in Las Vegas, serving 47.5 million passengers, had 93 runway incursions, according to the report. Smaller airports like Oakland International and San Jose’s Mineta had 13 and 42 runway incursions, respectively.
