- AAL106 first taxi clearance included runway 4L as departing runway (not in video)
-- Then told to cross 31L at K and continue on to 4L. (in video after the reference from the Captain).
-- When entering the runway 4L (about to cross 4L at J - diagram layover) they were told to stop several times on GND frequency (not in video)

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The U2 required more than a mile of runway to land and it was not just about slowing down, it was actually very difficult to navigate to a (static) runway.

I have no clue why anyone would think a U2 could land on a carrier.

I see no reason why it could not take off from a carrier.

Yeah, I'd say the length of the plane is basically the shortest possible runway!

I remember the first time I saw the Ring Nebula through my Dobsonian and thought "man, that thing is really far away". Then I swung my scope to Cassiopeia's "W" and looked at the ghostly smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. I tried to fathom the distance and came up lacking. My eyes were better then and I could see things in the mid-6s, but even with full night vision and using averted vision, I couldn't make out any detail; it was just a little wisp of light where the middle was a touch brighter than the edges.
That was the day I fully became an atheist. It made no sense that God would put a smudge of light 2.5 million light years away that was actually a trillion purposeless stars. I had no answer for that. Standing on that runway in the Sierra mountains, enveloped in blackness and looking at Andromeda, I felt a direct link between myself, time and the universe. I didn't need heaven anymore and I never felt the existential dread of death ever again. I understood that I was part of infinity and that was enough.

Yeah I've played a few flight sims and landing on short runways below hills is very hard.

Lot of reasons to hate that approach plate---unstabilized and requires a lot of pilot skill...and then, if the pilot isn't skilled, stuff goes wrong.

Hong Kong's old Kai Tak---same thing.

The temptation is always to NOT stuff it into the ground on approach which overshoots touchdown---and then you're running down off the end of the runway...egads.

Never knew they had rear wheel steering, they must be super easy to handle on tight runways for their size.

Wonder if its an illusion, but that runway looks wavy as hell...

Footnotes
First, B-17 #909, which completed 150 successful combat missions over Europe crashed last week---during an exhibition flight. Multiple fatalities. incredibly sad. The world's most experienced B-17 pilot was at the controls and they'd lost an engine when it crashed on the return approach to the runway.
Second, night missions for B-17s were rare, in part because of American doctrine--daylight precision bombing...

A slightly wet runway might have helped a little?

Still a brilliant landing. Well done.

Well, they're much farther apart than they appear...and yet, not far enough lol.
One of the reasons SFO has such horrendous weather delays is that the runways are JUST close enough together that the FAA does not currently allow for side by side instrument approaches to them in bad weather. So, what is a "two lane" airport suddenly becomes a "one lane" airport as soon as the fog, clouds, or stuff shows up. And then the delays become ridiculous

Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

Fortunately they were already doing a go-around by the time ATC noticed, a few seconds later would have been a disaster. Their minimum altitude was reported as 18m, which is a bit under a metre above the tail height of a Boeing 787-9.

They do have those alarms, but it was initially reported this plane was too far off course from R28R to trigger them and part of the investigation will be whether they were even operating at the time.

A major contributing factor for this incident was that the second runway, 28L, was closed and lights off at the time of the incident. As a result, the FAA has changed San Francisco landing procedures no longer permitting visual approach when an adjacent parallel runway is closed - https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/faa-changes-san-francisco-landing-procedures-after-a-440380/

They were, for the runway on their right, which is not Runway 28R (the thicker red line).
Edit: The thick line below that is 28L, I'm not sure what the visibility was like, but to confuse a taxiway for a runway is pretty incompetent.

That's a drastic error on the part of the pilots (although I can see how it could cause confusion).