Air Canada flight 759's captain and co-pilot had been awake all day and were coming into San Francisco in the early hours of the morning, at the lowest point of their circadian cycle. A runway was closed for resurfacing, but they forgot or missed the note, and as a result almost landed on a taxiway full of planes getting ready to take off. It could well have been the worst airline disaster in American history.
At that point he noticed that the position of Air Canada flight 759 looked “very strange.” Flight 759 overflew United Airlines flight 1 at an altitude of 100 feet and kept descending, headed straight for the Philippine Airlines A340. But with its landing lights on, the huge A340 was almost impossible to miss from such a close vantage point. At an altitude of 84 feet, both pilots on flight 759 called for a go-around simultaneously, and the captain advanced the throttles to abandon the approach. While the engines spooled up, the A320 dropped to a low point of about 65 feet, coming a hair’s breadth from clipping the 55-foot-tall vertical stabilizer of Philippine Airlines flight 115.
10 feet from contact, but it would have been followed by a far worst collision with the next jet on the taxiway, with a similar result--and death toll--to the Tenerife disaster.
