Pilots of a Badr AirlinesIlyushin IL-76TD four-engine heavy cargo jet came within feet of landing on workers and equipment on a new, unfinished runway at United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Sharjah International Airport in late June in 2014, partly because of a Jeppesen airport diagram that appeared to show the runway was open.
The daytime incident, which took place in good weather at the conclusion of a flight from Khartoum, Sudan, scattered workers on the unfinished Runway 30 that is being built to replace the in-service Runway 30, says the UAE’s Air Accident Investigation Sector (AAIS) in a final report on the incident (PDF). The pilots—seeing a metal, upright “X” lit in white lights placed near the runway end to mark it as closed—began the go-around at 0.3 nm from the threshold of the new runway at an altitude of 50 ft., low enough so that the jet blast from the go-around moved a 1-ton piece of equipment backward on the runway. There were no injuries or damage to the aircraft.