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That’s not what the article said. “Glide Path is a computerized system based at an airport that calculates a plane’s path of descent and sends it to pilots in real time.”

That's what the article says. But, it's Reuters, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they got it totally wrong.

I'm an instrument-rated pilot, and I've never heard of a "Glide Path" system. But, it's been a while since I've flown in the cockpit, so I may have missed it.

I've done a quick look on the web, and haven't found anything about it, either.

Besides, if the ILS was off then they wouldn’t be able to make evening and night landings after dark at that airport.

An ILS isn't required to make a landing at night. It's only required when visibility is limited. SFO 29L has (or had) a 4-light PAPI, and it would have provided all the guidance that was needed.

We fly and have our own small plane also. The thing that I have noticed in the last few years is that even in some of the newer general aviation airplanes there can be so many “safety features” that they become a distraction. Instead of flying the plane pilots can become distracted by all of the bells and whistles going off.

I was watching a video taken from the inside of the cockpit of a commuter plane landing at a small airport in the foot hills... on downwind, base and final a computer voice was giving dire sounding terrain warnings and even saying repeatedly, “Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!” on short final. The pilot of course was wisely ignoring this distraction and just flying his plane, but it kind of made me glad that I don't have that kind of crap installed in our airplane.

The worst landing I ever made... I was coming into a small airport that I had been to before, on short final my passengers yelled out, “Watch out for those wires!” The wires of course went under the runway, but he saw the poles on both sides that had conduits that routed the wires down.

It distracted me for a moment at a critical time in the landing sequence. I nosed up briefly which caused the plane to lose airspeed. I immediately pointed the nose back down, but then I had to flair much more than normal to arrest our descent as we entered ground effect near the surface of the runway. This put us in a nose high attitude and the tie down for the tail actually started scraping on the ground before the main gear touched the pavement. It made a bad noise but fortunately did not hurt anything other than scraping off about a quarter inch of aluminum from the tie down.

To me this 777 accident sounds a little like a jumbo sized version of what happened to me during my worst landing. My guess is that something distracted the pilot and caused him to deviate from his normal approach with tragic consequences.

My experience: CFII (that's Instrument Instructor for Mr. Webster, who clearly isn't a pilot); corpjets (Sabreliner type); Aerospace Engineer (that's what it says on the diploma), 35 years in flight/aeronautical/aerospace industry.

I have NEVER heard of a "computerized system" called Glide Path.

There IS an element of the ILS called the GLIDESLOPE and it was OTS as the NOTAM noted - pretty normal for the summertime, so you can do maintenance.

For 28L the usual gig is to get the Quiet Bridge Visual Approach.

No glideslope required. Just your eyes, and like others have noted, the Radar Altimeter callouts that every CAT II/III qualified aircraft has (see CAT II minimum equipment search, click on Subpart D link at FAA.gov) can be helpful. Also, the PAPI is noted as having a different angle (VGSi) then the GS, but that shouldn't matter since the GS is OTS!!!

So maybe in the last few years I missed out on some Momentous Development within the traditional ILS that digitized some of it's old analog functionality, but I can find no evidence of that.

But maybe a couple of non-flying Jorno majors at Al-Reuters understands these things better then I do.

Or the other people here who are skeptical of this little piece of Fiction that the reporters are trying to use to whip up some hype.

What WILL be of interest is whether this guy read the NOTAM and understood that the GS element was out - and if not, was he using GS information to fly the approach? (he'd be flying to a symbol that has the little "out of service" barber pole next to it, sort of a dead give away that somethings um, Wrong).

There's a lotta working ATPs on this forum, maybe one of them could jump in here, but I suspect its going to be the same comment: clueless "reporters" misinterpreting FAA reports and trying to fluff it up into something bigger then it is.

It is ALWAYS bad to speculate early in an aircraft accident about what happened. Every accident in a Transport Category environment like this has multiple issues in the chain leading to an actual accident. The accident itself is the result of the confluence of all the issues. There is NEVER any one glaring mistake, not when you have a guy with X thousand hours flying. Even the worst of them don't screw up that bad. If the guy didn't want to fly the Visual approach he had his choice of LOC/DME, RNAV, etc. See this page: LOC DME Y RWY 28L approach. Note ALL the approaches in the list!

Dealing with an OTS GS is no big deal. So the truth will probably lie somewhere else.

And right about now, some of the more experienced NTSB guys already know it. But they won't say for quite some time.