OMG! When you keep zooming in at the most northern part of the route (when they finally turned) you break partially through the weather radar and can see how close they came to Mt Wilson. If this woman and those Boise controllers all are those people hired under the Obama change in policy then everyone responsible should be fired. I don’t want affirmative action when it comes to hiring of air traffic controllers.
I forgot. You need to go in and select terrain in Flight Aware. If I knew how to post photos here I would post a screen shot. They had to have had the AWS go off. Any pilots here comment on that turn? Is that steep like they knew they were in danger? Hope the pilots had a change of underwear.
Using the coordinates from the link below I have them at about 2000 feet from the peak at 6200 feet, only 500 feet above Mt. Wilson. The numbers aren’t always accurate, though.
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/EVA15/history/20161216/0730Z/KLAX/RCTP/tracklog
Looking at the the flight path it looks like they changed course using the flight computer and never took manual control. (It’s a precise and smooth course.) They would have been safer with respect to the mountains if they had continued turning west, but then they may have been in danger of having a midair with the other jet.
It appears from history that jets normally take off to the west. I don’t know if Pacific flights when they take off to the East normally turn north or south, though.
Listen to the following from the control tower.
The controller tells them to turn left and head south. Instead they turn right toward the mountains. The media is reporting this story incorrectly. This wasn’t a controller problem, but another Asian pilot problem.