Asiana flight crash at San Francisco

[MD-11F]

Yes, commercial pilots should be capable of flying visual approaches.

Enough said.

Yes it would be great if every airport never had the G/S inop, but it shouldn't be a big deal if it is on a CAVU day. I find it funny to see comments against the airport operator. There are many parts of the world where flying can be challenging, but if the pilots need a 17 mile final with a Loc and G/S to be "safe" that is crazy. Using the logic some are posting here the flight should be grounded if the AP cannot be used to fly an autoland approach... and that's WHY we have SOME crews that find FLYING challenging.

[msbbarratt]

Whatever pilots may think of this, as a person who pays to be flown I consider it absolutely unacceptable. I'm paying for technology that maximises my safety, not two tired pilots trying to divide by 300.

I take the opposite view. As an engineer I know that technology *does not* guarantee safety, more often than not it has the opposite effect sooner or later.

And as a person who pays for a couple (or more) expensive guys to sit at the front of an airplane and fly me round the world I expect them to at least be able to put it down on the ground without requiring the assistance of anyone/anything on the ground if needs be. Afterall, there's plenty of redundancy on the plane, and I bet there's almost none on the ground.

Ok so they do use things like ILS routinely, I've no problem with that, but "routine" absolutely should not evolve into "necessary". Furthermore I won't fly with any airline that I believe doesn't share the same sentiment.

Message for such airlines; making your pilots autoland *all* the time might save a bit of cash now, but accidents like this will wipe that out in one go and might sink your business altogether. Have a heart, let the poor buggers fly planes and do us all a favour.

[RodH]

Not hard to see why it crashed.

That video of Fred Hayes says it all. Gross under shoot and late attempt at recovery. How it got into that predicament is yet to be discovered .
Did the crew in the aircraft on the taxi way make any reports , they would have had a very good view of the accident ?

[VinRouge]

Afterall, there's plenty of redundancy on the plane, and I bet there's almost none on the ground.

You would be wrong.

[MountainBear]

GF writes,

Exactly what is the relationship between the ILS being OTS and the crew getting significantly slow on final?

It has about the same relationship as the price of tea in China. It doesn't matter whether the specific equipment at issue would have made any difference in this specific case. What matters is that the passengers are paying for equipment that works. If the equipment wasn't working then they didn't get what they paid for. No different than the fact that they are paying for pilots who don't crash their flights. Looks like the passengers didn't get that, either.

[con-pilot]

Indeed. The ILS isn't a safety aid, it's an aid to fly to lower minimums safely; which doesn't apply here as it was VMC anyway.

Very correct, ILSs and visual glide path aids, are just that, aids, not mandatory requirements for excellent VMC visual approaches.

If any airline has pilots so poorly trained and/or lack experience to the point they cannot make a visual approach and landing in perfect weather, they should be prohibited from shooting visual approaches without a full ILS and visual glide slopes backups. So send them to another airport where they can have all the aids possible, including being monitored by a PAR, where they can be ordered to go around if they can't figure it out themselves.

But even with the above, it does not address the low speed issue.

[VinRouge]

Exactly what is the relationship between the ILS being OTS and the crew getting significantly slow on final?

The very last slice of cheese preventing the accident was taken away. Now it's the job of the investigators and the national regulatory authorities to figure out why the other slices were holier than Edam. I suggest cultural attitudes and cross cockpit gradient would be a good place to start. Next would be corporate attitude to screw ups. How about reviewing your initial, line and recurrent training instead of sacking those unlucky enough to find the holes in your procedures?

Procedures can't cover everything.

[texasjet]

Mountain Bear:

I'm not sure what you're driving at with this concern about a GS being OTS. You're correct in one thing, the passengers did not get what they were paying for. The 28L G/S being OTS has nothing to do with the gross negligence of the crew.

Yup. I said it. Gross Negligence of the crew. Besides getting the darn thing airborne, this is the most basic and important maneuver - a visual approach to a landing.

FLY THE AIRPLANE

[oceancrosser]

I think the NTSB tweets NTSB - National Transportation Safety Board pretty much tell the pilots on this forum what happened. The "why" will come later.
Others can continue to post pages of useless noise.

[con-pilot]

I think the NTSB tweets

Yes I know, I went to their Aircraft Accident Investigators school at the FAA's Aeronautical Center.

[KBPsen]

There are a lot of comments here that illustrates how little is understood of what causes accidents.. Most in the tone of knowing better.

[James7]

Luggage

Most of the luggage would have been strewn around the cabin just as easy to pick your case up and walk out the door which is what most of the passengers seemed to have done, at least it clears the aisles for the less able.

Chinese mourn Asiana jet crash deaths | ABS-CBN News

[Machinbird]

The reason the aircraft hit the seawall was not due to lack of a glideslope. It hit he seawall because it had insufficient power during the final phase of the approach and got slow. You can see this in the flightaware data and in the video> (would you intentionally flare for landing over the water?)

The reason the aircraft got slow should not be hard to nail down. This post by suninmyeyes should be worth noting: http://www.pprune.org/7926629-post315.html

The NTSB is on it and we should have detailed answers soon.

All too similar to a RA-5C Vigilante ramp strike I witnessed in days gone by.

[jumpseater]

#499 MountainBear
Second, please stop bashing the passengers with the luggage. While it is obvious to arm-chair analysts that this is not proper behavior in the aftermath of an accident people do not always behave in logical ways.

I'd suggest that from survivable accident footage and images this is often 'proper and logical' behaviour to those that do pick up their stuff. it'd be interesting to see what the split is those that take nothing and those that take it all. The ease of access to your stuff is obviously a factor. Thats not going to change any time soon and hopefully airline CC training will reflect this, and ways to deal with it.

Like the earlier poster I think this aircrafts tail from the CNN vid was in the water prior to sea wall impact.

[BrandonSoMD]

Okay, after watching that video, I take back anything I thought about unreliable eyewitness testimony about a flipping-over aircraft.

From the distance people saw it, and given the lack of a tail surface to indicate "right side up", it sure looked like a roll-over. Simply a miracle it didn't do the Sioux City UA232 roll-and-explode.

Let's don't be so quick to toss out data even though people do sometimes get it wrong...

[BenThere]

One thing occurs to me, that I can sit and pass judgment, aged 62 and never had an incident or violation, but who knows what will happen on the next flight?

When I'm retired and safely out of the arena I'll pass judgment mercilessly, I'm sure. Until then, I'm glad it wasn't me, I acknowledge I haven't always been perfect, and on an occasion or two I've been lucky. And I've been covered more than once by the other guy in the cockpit.

I've got some sympathy for the Korean crew going through this ordeal. The pilot flying, I think, is responsible, and to a lesser extent, the pilot not flying. They both have hell to pay, as they should. That's how the system works. But haven't we all screwed up from time to time, but just had the luck, common sense, or help to recover in time, before it became an incident?

[con-pilot]

I've got some sympathy for the Korean crew going through this ordeal. The pilot flying, I think, is responsible, and to a lesser extent, the pilot not flying. They both have hell to pay, as they should. That's how the system works. But haven't we all screwed up from time to time, but just had the luck, common sense, or help to recover in time, before it became an incident?

I have, or did, in my 42 year career of flying, I'd be a poor liar if I said otherwise. 'There but for the grace of God, go I...'

[TangoUniform]

So with the data revealed thus far, we have a fairly accurate reason of what/how this happened. But what human factor related issues actually "caused" this...or what was said earlier, "why"? The factors unveiled will probably very difficult to fix. The companies want us to fly as much as possible using the automation, because accidents seem to only happen when humans are flying the aircraft. The down side is obvious, automation is not always available or U/S, so then the human has to take over. But skills have atrophied, gotten rusty, and put aside. There has to be a positive medium. So many human factor issues to deal with in a blog.

Look at three deadly major accidents in the past few year, Turkish 1951, AirFrance 447 and now this (probably). All due to, too much reliance on automation.

[fire wall]

Gents, the 777 has a function where by if you bring the RX waypoint to the top of the legs page 1L and engage VNAV then it will give you a 3 deg profile to that waypoint. That was option # 1.
Option #2 could have been to plug in the RNAV approach and use it for vertical guidance whilst conducting the visual approach..... what we call the Chinese glide slope on the side of the NAV display.
Option #3 could have been to look out the window and put the aiming point of 1000 ft in the bottom third of the windshield and keep it there and use the thrust to maintain a constant speed profile.

The inability to recognise a divergent approach (indisputable thru flight track v/s data) and the lack of a go around below a stabilised criteria height limit (again indisputable) is an indictment on the professionalism of the crew piloting the aircraft.

In response to BBK, I am in agreement with B-HKD. If you know anything about Korean law and their culture then these guys are toast.

[fireflybob]

What about the role and responsibility of the Operator?

All airlines place "limitations" on what pilots are permitted to do based on experience, for example, and/or even specific approaches to certain runways. One example I can think of was Corfu at night where our briefing said the PAPIS MUST be fully serviceable.

In the same vein the Operator must be satisfied that their flight crew are capable of flying different types of approach. If the Operator is not happy that (for example) it's crews are up to the task of flying a type of approach under certain conditions then such a prohibition should be applied.

It's unfair to blame it on the goalkeepers alone when it's the managers who are culpable.