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SAN FRANCISCO — It’s hard to imagine just how close an Air Canada pilot came to crashing into four fully-loaded passenger jets on a crowded SFO taxiway after mistaking it for a runway.

The altitude sounds low. The distance above planes appears very short. The audio rings alarm bells.

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New revelations in SFO near-miss: Air Canada flight got as low as 175 feet The Bay Area News Group took data provided by FlightAware that show the position of the four planes on the taxiway, as well as the flight path of Air Canada flight 759 from that July 7 night, and created an animated graphic to illustrate what actually happened as the jet nearly triggered one of the worst aviation disasters of all time. In addition to this data, the news organization gleaned information provided by American and Canadian aviation regulators, and also used air traffic audio to produce the clearest picture yet of what happened on the near-miss.

The flight path data pulled by FlightAware comes from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Surface Movement Event Service which combines airport radar with equipment installed on airplanes to determine their position.

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