SFO is said to be a somewhat abnormal/difficult approach [0]. This could cause stress and fractured attention in the pilot.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there was some other complicating factor. Planes don't usually crash (or nearly crash) without several safety factors being breached.
When the Asiana flight 214 crash landed in SFO in 2013, there was a blog post from a pilot who claimed to be a Lufthansa Air pilot.
He wrote that because of city of San Francisco's unusually stringent noise mitigation rule for airliners flying over the city to land at the SFO airport, an airliner has to make a very steep descent from an altitude higher than normal. So instead of bringing down an airliner gradually, a pilot has to get down to the airport in a hurry, requiring much more stringent management of energy/speed. It sounds simple for a plane that's flying straight in, but for a pilot at end of a 10+ hr flight, it's not always so simple. At least I think that's what the purported Lufthansa pilot claimed.
that's only in the (quite rare) case that the wind is coming from the south and the planes are coming in over Daly City .... normally planes land in the other direction and (like the Asiana flight) come in over the Bay.
They do however take off over a lot of homes in Daly City and are required to fly a flight plan that seems to postpone a lot of their climb until they are out over the Pacific
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there was some other complicating factor. Planes don't usually crash (or nearly crash) without several safety factors being breached.
0: https://jethead.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/how-do-you-land-at-...