By Canadian Press

Jet was within 100 feet of hitting 2 planes in San Francisco

Jul 13, 2017 | 5:15 PM

An Air Canada plane with 140 people on board came within 100 feet of crashing onto two of four planes lined up to take off at San Francisco International Airport last week, according to a preliminary report by Canadian air safety regulators released Thursday.

The finding provided the first official accounting of how close the Air Canada plane came to causing what could have been one of the worst disasters in commercial aviation history.

Instead of lining up to land on the runway, the pilot of the flight from Toronto mistakenly descended toward a taxiway just to the right of where four other airliners were idling in the darkness.

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board released a short summary of the July 7 incident which U.S. authorities are still investigating. The summary said Air Canada Flight 759 had already travelled one-quarter of a mile over the taxiway before aborting the landing.

As the Airbus 320 pulled up sharply it flew 100 feet over the first two jets, 200 feet above the third and 300 feet over the fourth, the summary said. It then circled and landed safely.

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“This was very close to a catastrophic event,” said John Cox, a safety consultant and retired airline pilot.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which is heading the investigation, has not released any information and spokesman Keith Holloway said he could not comment on another agency’s data.

Transportation Safety Board of Canada spokesman Chris Krepski said he did not know the source of the data in the document, which was released as part of a “daily notification log” of safety incidents that Canadian air operators are obliged to report to regulators. Air Canada did not immediately return a request for comment.

Collisions on the ground are particularly dangerous because planes waiting to take off are loaded with fuel. The worst crash in aviation history occurred in 1977 when a KLM Boeing 747 taking off in the Canary Islands plowed into a Pan Am 747 that was waiting to take off; 583 people died in the crash and fires.

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Pritchard reported from Los Angeles. Contact him at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman

Justin Pritchard, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

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Jet was within 100 feet of hitting 2 planes in San Francisco

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