Asiana flight crash at San Francisco

[rer47]

FlightAware log

There has been much discussion of the FlightAware track logs, including the evidently erroneous approach profile published by the New York Times.



The track logs visible on the FA web site have the time stamps truncated to the minute. In the .kml files available on the FA web site the time stamps are given to the nearest second, allowing accurate plotting of the data. Evidently the NYT profile was constructed from the truncated time stamps. The NYT graphic shows a 600-foot decrease in altitude in 9 seconds. Actually the time between these data points was 26 seconds. I have plotted the approach profile below from data in the .kml file, and have added the NTSB data points. There is a discrepancy between the FA and NTSB altitudes at about 15 seconds. It appears that whatever went wrong happened in the final 15 seconds of flight, since an earlier post shows the 6 July approach was not much different than earlier ones until this point.