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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 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 parallel taxiway just to the right of where four other airliners were idling in the darkness. Taxiways are the aviation equivalent of feeder roads that planes use to roll between runways and terminals, and have different lights than runways. Canada's Transportation Safety Board released a short summary of the July 7 incident which US authorities are still investigating. The summary said Air Canada Flight 759 had already traveled 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. "This was very close to a catastrophic event," said John Cox, a safety consultant and retired airline pilot. Transportation Safety Board of Canada spokesman Chris Krepski said he could not confirm 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. The most likely source was Air Canada, which did not immediately return a request for comment.<br/>

Air New Zealand has won a Supreme Court pay fight with the country's biggest pilots' union. The dispute concerned whether the New Zealand Air Line Pilots Association was able to take clauses from collective agreements Air New Zealand made with other unions and incorporate these into its own members' agreement with the national carrier. The New Zealand Air Line Pilots Association (NZALPA) was formed in 1945 and about three quarters of the country's pilots are members. 84% of Air New Zealand's pilots are NZALPA's members. The NZALPA's collective agreement contains a ratchet clause, where the parties agree that "any agreement entered into by the company with any other pilot employee group which is more favourable than provided for in this agreement will be passed on to pilots covered by this agreement." The union invoked this clause when it wanted to claim a more favourable pay rise for pilots of Boeing 737s and second officers after Air New Zealand had agreed with the Federation of Air New Zealand Pilots (FANZP), a newer and smaller union, to provide a pay rise of 13 per cent, more than the NZALPA collective agreement provided for. Air New Zealand declined on the basis that the proper interpretation of this clause was that it allowed passing on the whole of the collective agreement and not just of particular parts.<br/>