Passengers evacuate the Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft after a crash landing at San Francisco International Airport in California July 6, 2013 in this handout photo provided by passenger Eugene Anthony Rah released to Reuters on July 8, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Eugene Anthony Rah/Handout via Reuters
The wreckage of Asiana Flight 214, which crashed on Saturday, July 6, 2013, is seen on a tarmac in front of the San Francisco skyline at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, July 10, 2013. Investigators are struggling to piece together what went wrong in an accident that left two of the 307 aboard dead and close to 20 seriously injured. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
The wreckage of Asiana Flight 214, which crashed on Saturday, July 6, 2013, is seen on a tarmac in front of the San Francisco skyline at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, July 10, 2013. Investigators are struggling to piece together what went wrong in an accident that left two of the 307 aboard dead and close to 20 seriously injured. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
The tail of Asiana Flight 214, which crashed on Saturday, July 6, 2013, is seen in front of a span of the Bay Bridge on a tarmac at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, July 10, 2013. Investigators are struggling to piece together what went wrong in an accident that left two of the 307 aboard dead and close to 20 seriously injured. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
The tail of Asiana Flight 214, which crashed on Saturday, July 6, 2013, is seen on a tarmac at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, Wednesday, July 10, 2013. Investigators are struggling to piece together what went wrong in an accident that left two of the 307 aboard dead and close to 20 seriously injured. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
| Buy AP Photo Reprints | ||
|
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — As Flight 214 descended over San Francisco Bay, both Asiana Airlines pilots were trying something new.
In the left seat of the cockpit sat Lee Gang-kuk, a 46-year-old pilot with 35 hours of experience flying a Boeing 777 who was landing the big jet for his first time at San Francisco International Airport. At his right was Lee Jeong-Min, a trainer making his first trip as an instructor pilot.
While the two men had years of aviation experience, this mission involved unfamiliar duties, and it was the first time they had flown together. The flight came to a tragic end when the airliner, which came in too low and too slow, crash-landed on Saturday, killing two passengers and injuring many others as it skittered and spun 100 feet.
Investigators trying to piece together what went wrong are looking at the pairing of the pilots, who were assigned to work together through a tightly regulated system developed after several deadly crashes in the 1980s were blamed in part on inexperience in the cockpit.
They will also be examining their working relationship, said National Transportation Safety Board chairman Deborah Hersman on Wednesday.
“We are certainly interested to see if there are issues where there are challenges to crew communication, if there’s an authority break in where people won’t challenge one another,” she said.
Pilots are trained to communicate their concerns openly, she said, “to make sure that a junior pilot feels comfortable challenging a senior pilot and to make sure the senior pilot welcomes feedback in a cockpit environment from all members of the crew and considers it.”
The NTSB has now concluded interviews with all four pilots who were aboard the plane.
Hersman said Wednesday the pilot trainee told investigators he was blinded by a light at about 500 feet, which would have been 34 seconds before impact and the point at which the airliner began to slow and drop precipitously. She said lasers have not been ruled out. It was unclear, however, whether the flash might have played a role in the crash.
Hersman also said that a third pilot in the jump seat of the cockpit told investigators he was warning them their speed was too slow as they approached the runway.
And she said when the plane came to a stop, pilots told passengers to stay seated for 90 seconds while they communicated with the tower as part of a safety procedure. Hersman said this has happened after earlier accidents and was not necessarily a problem. People did not begin fleeing the aircraft until 90 seconds later when a fire was spotted outside the plane.
Hersman stressed that while the trainee pilot was flying the plane, the instructor was ultimately responsible, and thus the way they worked together will be scrutinized.
“That’s what the airline needs to do, be responsible so that in the cockpit you’re matching the best people, especially when you’re introducing someone to a new aircraft,” former NTSB Chairman James Hall said.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology aeronautics professor Mary Cummings said it’s common for two commercial pilots who have never worked together before to be assigned to the same flight.
But she said the military tries to have crews work together more permanently.
“Research would tell you that crew pairing with the same people over longer periods of time is safer,” she said. “When two people fly together all the time, you get into a routine that’s more efficient. You have experience communicating.”
Jeff Skiles, a US Airways first officer, said that with the right training it should not matter if a pilot new to a plane is paired with a pilot making his first trip as a training captain.
“Everybody had to have their first time,” Skiles said. “You can’t show up and have 500 hours experience in aircraft.”
Skiles was the co-pilot of the “Miracle on the Hudson” jet that lost thrust in both engines after colliding with a flock of geese. The skillful flying of captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and teamwork between Skiles and Sullenberger was credited for a water landing on the Hudson River that saved the lives of all aboard.
The January 2009 accident happened after the pilots had been paired together only four days.
Details emerging from Asiana pilot interviews, cockpit recorders and control-tower communications indicate that Lee Gang-kuk, who was halfway through his certification training for the Boeing 777, and his co-pilot and instructor, Lee Jeong-Min, thought the airliner’s speed was being controlled by an autothrottle set for 157 mph.
Inspectors found that the autothrottle had been “armed,” or made ready for activation, Hersman said. But investigators are still determining whether it had been engaged. In the last two minutes, there was a lot of use of autopilot and autothrusters, and investigators are going to look into whether pilots made the appropriate commands and if they knew what they were doing, she said.
When the pilots realized the plane was approaching the waterfront runway too low and too slow, they both reached for the throttle. Passengers heard a loud roar as the plane revved up in a last-minute attempt to abort the landing.
The two pilots at the controls during the accident had also been in the cockpit for takeoff. Then they rested during the flight while a second pair of pilots took over. The two pairs swapped places again about 90 minutes before landing, giving the trainee a chance to fly during the more challenging approach phase.
The investigation is ongoing, and Hersman cautioned against speculating about the cause. But she stressed that even if the autothrottle malfunctioned, the pilots were ultimately responsible for control of the airliner.
“There are two pilots in the cockpit for a reason,” she said Wednesday. “They’re there to fly, to navigate, to communicate and if they’re using automation a big key is to monitor.”
As the trainee pilot flew, she said, the instructor captain, who is ultimately responsible for flight safety, was tasked with monitoring. The third pilot was in the cockpit jumpseat also to monitor the landing.
Crash survivor Brian Thomson, who was returning from a martial arts competition in South Korea and walked away physically unscathed, said he’s not concerned about the pilot’s lack of experience with the airliner.
“At some point you have to start at hour one, hour two. It’s just natural. Everyone starts a career someway, somehow. Starts a new plane someway, somehow. They have to have training,” he said.
The flight originated in Shanghai and stopped over in Seoul before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco.
A dozen survivors remained hospitalized Wednesday, half flight attendants, including three thrown from the airliner during the accident. One has been identified as 25-year-old Maneenat Tinnakul, whose father told the Thairath newspaper in Thailand she suffered a minor backache.
Another flight attendant, Sirithip Singhakarn, was reported in intensive care.
Meanwhile, fire officials continued their investigation into whether one of their trucks might have run over one of the two summer camp bound Chinese teenagers, Wang Linjia and Ye Mengyuan, killed in the crash.
Citing similarities to a February 2009 fatal U.S. airline crash near Buffalo, N.Y., two New York Democrats — Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Brian Higgins — on Wednesday called on the Federal Aviation Administration to issue long-delayed safety regulations that would require pilots to undergo more extensive training on how to avoid stalling accidents.
“While the (Asiana) investigation is still ongoing, one thing is clear, this crash and the other recent crashes like Flight 3407 demonstrate a troubling pattern in which pilots are mishandling air speed, which can lead to fatal stalls,” Schumer said.
___
Associated Press writers Joan Lowy in Washington and Haven Daley in Scotts Valley, Calif., contributed to this report.
___
Follow Martha Mendoza at https://twitter.com/mendozamartha .
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Investigator in Charge Bill English (R) and Chairman Deborah Hersman discuss the progress of the Asiana Airlines flight 214 investigation in San Francisco, California in this picture provided by NTSB on July 9, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/NTSB/Handout via Reuters
SAN FRANCISCO |
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The pilots aboard the Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 that crashed in San Francisco relied on automatic equipment – an auto-throttle system – to maintain airspeed and did not realize the plane was flying too slowly until it was just 200 feet above the ground, the head of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said on Tuesday.
In her third detailed briefing on Saturday’s crash that killed two Chinese passengers and injured more than 180 other people, NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman also said two flight attendants were ejected from the plane after its tail hit a seawall in front of the runway and was torn off. Both were found injured but alive on the side of the runway.
Hersman said many questions remained about the incident. The South Korean airline’s flight crew members were not tested for drugs or alcohol after the crash, a requirement for pilots of U.S.-based carriers involved in accidents, she said.
The accounts given to investigators by the pilots, as relayed by Hersman, confirmed information from the plane’s flight data recorder that showed the plane was traveling 25 percent below its target airspeed as it came in for landing.
While she has declined to speculate on the cause of the crash, much of the information released by the NTSB suggests pilot error as a main focus of the investigation.
The pilot in charge of landing the plane on Saturday was in training on the 777 and was roughly halfway through the process, while seated next to him was a co-pilot on his first flight as an instructor. Both were experienced pilots, although they had not flown together before, Hersman said.
“At about 500 feet, he realized that they were low,” Hersman told reporters, referring to the instructor pilot’s account of the failed last-second attempts to avoid Saturday’s disaster. “Between 500 and 200 feet, they had a lateral deviation and they were low. They were trying to correct at that point.”
Referring to the instructor pilot, she said it was not until 200 feet that “he recognized the auto-throttles were not maintaining speed” and tried to abort the landing. Hersman had previously said that the plane had been at an altitude of 200 feet 16 seconds before crashing.
Three of the four pilots on board were in the cabin during the landing, although only two could see the runway, Hersman said, citing the interviews by investigators with the crew.
Hersman said an examination of the wreckage showed that the auto-throttle was “armed,” but it was not clear if it had been properly engaged or had somehow failed before the plane slowed to a near-stall and hit the ground. “We need to understand a little better” how the auto-throttle is used, she said.
“They had set speed at 137 knots (158 mph), and he assumed that the auto-throttles were maintaining speed,” Hersman said of the instructor pilot.
She noted that the pilots were responsible for maintaining airspeed.
“We have a flying pilot and two other pilots in the cockpit and they have a monitoring function,” she said. “One of the critical things that needs to be monitored on an approach to landing is speed. So we need to understand what was going on in the cockpit and also what was going on with the aircraft.”
‘RAMPANT SPECULATION’
The world’s largest pilots union rebuked the NTSB for its handling of the crash investigation, saying the agency had released too much information too quickly, which could lead to wrong conclusions and compromise safety.
Releasing data from the flight’s black boxes without full investigative information for context “has fueled rampant speculation” about the cause of the crash, the Air Line Pilots Association International said in a statement.
Hersman rejected the criticism. “We work for the traveling public,” she said. “We feel it is important to show our work.”
Aviation consultant Hans Weber, the president of TECOP International, Inc., said the accident may revive a long-running debate over whether pilots’ increasing reliance on automated flight systems has taken a toll on their “hand-flying” skills.
Maintaining proper airspeed and altitude is “the most basic responsibility of the pilot, like breathing in and out,” Weber said. But it could be the case, he added, that “pilots are paying attention to the computer rather than paying attention to the fundamentals.”
Hersman did not comment on whether anyone in addition to the two flight attendants was ejected from the plane, though the two teenage Chinese students who died were found outside the aircraft. One of them may have been run over by an emergency vehicle, San Francisco fire department officials have said, but the local coroner has not yet released autopsy results showing the cause of death.
Asiana Airlines Chief Executive Yoon Young-doo arrived in San Francisco on Tuesday to meet with U.S. investigators, Asiana staff and survivors of the crash.
Hersman also confirmed witness accounts that at least one emergency escape chute had deployed inside the aircraft, trapping a flight attendant. The pilot who was sitting in the cabin worked to free her, Hersman said.
“I saw a leg sticking out between the slide and the wall. It kept moving,” passenger Eugene Rah said in an interview on Monday. He said he and a man he believed was a crew member struggled to free her, adding: “He was asking me if I had anything sharp, but these days nobody can be on board with anything sharp.”
She was eventually freed and hospitalized with serious injuries, Rah said.
(Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke and Alwyn Scott; Writing by Jonathan Weber, Editing by Peter Henderson and Will Dunham)
