With 'inexperienced’ pilots at the helm, Boeing came in ‘below-speed’ before SF crash

The Boeing 777 that crashed at San Francisco airport on Saturday likely flew in too slowly, and tried to abort the landing seconds before the crash. Operator Asiana admits the pilot and his trainer both had little experience in their respective roles.

After studying flight recorder telemetry and pilot radio
conversations U.S. National Transportation Safety Board
Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said Flight 214 approached the tarmac
at “significantly below the target air speed” of 157 mph.

“We are not just talking about a few knots here or there,”
Hershan told the media. “We are certainly looking at pilot
performance, and we’re looking at communication between the two
crew members. But everything is still on the table.”

Lee Gang-guk, the flight captain, is an experienced pilot with
nearly 10,000 hours logged in flight. But he had completed only
43 hours and nine training flights on the 300-plus capacity
Boeing 777, although he had landed at the airport nearly 30 times
before in other aircraft.

Asiana has defended on-the-job training of pilots as “standard
practice” in the industry.

But Lee Jung-min, the senior trainer on the flight, who was
supposed to guide his colleague during the most difficult part of
any aerial journey, himself only received his training
certificate last month. This was his first flight as a trainer.

Asiana, South Korea’s second biggest airline, says it is not
aware of any technical difficulties on the 7-year-old plane, but
said it was “not appropriate” to blame the pilots until
the investigation is completed.

“For now, we acknowledge that there were no problems caused by
the 777-200 plane or engines,” company president Yoon
Young-doo said during a press briefing in Seoul.

On a clear afternoon, it appears as if the pilots have misjudged
the descent, disabling the throttle too early or at too low an
altitude to reach the landing strip of SFO, which is located on
the edge of water.

Recordings indicate no distress signals from the pilots until it
was too late.

Seven seconds before the crash, one of the cockpit crew called
for an increase in throttle, and three seconds later, the control
yoke began to shake violently – warning the pilots the plane was
about to stall

Less than two seconds before the crash, the pilot called to abort
the landing, vainly trying to pull the plane back up.

“The pilots were very slow in this critical phase of
flight,” said Hersman.

“Right before touchdown, I felt like the plane was trying to
take off. I was thinking ‘What’s happening?’ and then I felt a
bang,” cabin manager Lee Yoon-hye told San Fracisco media.

The plane then snagged the sea barrier at the edge of the landing
strip, flipped and hit the tarmac.

Due to what investigators have called the “structural
integrity” of the plane, the fact that the fuel tanks were
nearly empty, and fast actions of the crew, the vast majority of
the 305 people on-board escaped unscathed.

Two Chinese teenage girls on their way to a summer school – Wang
Linjia, aged 16, and Ye Mengyuan, 17 – died after being thrown
from the disintegrating fuselage. It is likely one of the two
victims was killed by one of the firefighting vehicles speeding
towards the crash site.

“One of the deceased did have injuries consistent with those
of having been run over by a vehicle,” said a spokesperson
for the San Francisco Fire Department.

Less than 20 people remain in hospital, but six of them are
critically injured, including a child, and two are likely to be
paralyzed.

Saturday’s botched landing is the second accident and the first
fatal crash in the 18-year service history of the Boeing 777 (a
BA plane also crash landed at Heathrow due to engine failure in
2008, but no one died). The US-made plane has logged more than 5
million successful flights.

Republished with permission from: RT