World’s Airline Management Culture to Blame for Asiana Crash
The unfortunate crash of Asiana Flight 214 two days ago is an accident that has been 15 years in the making.
On June 28, 1998, a United Airlines 747-400 departed San Francisco from runway 28R when the aircraft suffered an engine failure just after takeoff and the Pilot at the controls so badly mishandled the recovery, that the aircraft barely cleared the San Bruno hills by only 100 feet setting off car alarms and sending residents scurrying for cover.
The later report from the NTSB cited the Pilot’s inability to correctly identify and recover from one of the most practiced emergencies and that this was directly a result of a lack of recent real time flight experience and manual handling proficiency.
It seems as if once again this lesson has been lost on the Airline Industry.
I imagine that even before the NTSB report comes out that something very similar will be in the Board’s findings on this accident as well. In addition, I would bet that fatigue, lack of training and a complete failure of the all of the pilot’s situational awareness will also be cited as contributing factors. What all of this comes down to is that the Pilots training or lack thereof had failed them.
In terms of the conditions for the approach, this should have been a routine landing, even for a pilot under training and especially for the Captain who was conducting the training on this flight. However, what occurred was anything but routine.
On final approach, Asiana Flight 214’s attitude decayed to a point well before the crash that could only be described as being a completely unstable approach.
So what does all of this have to do with the Culture of Airline Management?
Fifteen years ago, it was indentified that there was a deficiency and erosion in the skills of pilots flying predominately long-haul routes and that there was a need to rectify this through increased training and also that when the situation was warranted and under controlled conditions, that the automatics of the aircraft should be disengaged and that the pilot should manually fly the aircraft to maintain their proficiency and familiarity with the handling characteristics of the aircraft in which they fly.
What has instead happened, is that training has been reduced to save costs and Airline Management across all of the Industry has discouraged their flight crew from disconnecting the automatics and the Manufacturers have backed this up with their own hubris extolling the performance of their automation saying that there a is minimal need, if ever, for the Pilot’s to fly the aircraft manually.
The result of all of this is what we saw in San Francisco over the weekend. Several experienced pilots who were not sufficiently trained to handle their aircraft in manual flight and the result being the loss of two lives for now and several injured.
The System of Air Travel is an amazing and complex system and thanks to the dedication and hard work of so many talented people, runs most days without a hitch. But as we all know things do change, break, mistakes are made and as this is known in the Industry an ‘Error Chain’ begins to form. When all of the errors in this chain of events line up, an incident or sometimes an accident will occur.
What will be debated after this accident and which has been discussed since automation first began making its way into the cockpits of modern airliners, is where do the errors originate, with the Pilot’s or with the automation. With this new technology the error chain has definitely been consistently weakened and this automation has been responsible for covering up many deficiencies that occur inside the cockpit and externally that once caused so many accidents.
But what we have witnessed is that even with all of these advancements, on a clear and sunny day with calm winds, is that there is no substitute for a well trained pilot.
Whatever, comes out of this investigation, I hope that the Industry and the Managers responsible for maintaining the proficiency of their Flight Departments will take to heart the importance of proper and regular training.
There will be more sunny days with aircraft without autothrust, with the Instrument Landing System inoperative, a runway with non-standard markings, it could possibly be another training flight and on top of all of this, all of the crew will be incredibly fatigued from a long night over the Pacific. What we can hope for is that this lesson will not be lost again on those responsible for the maintaining the standards of Aircrew. We can hope that Airline Managers will finally understand that training and proficiency are two things that cannot be sacrificed because no matter what their cost, the cost of not maintaining this standard is so much greater.
Last edited by Sullys Revenge; 12th Jul 2013 at 09:45.