Posted on 07/07/2013 8:55:35 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The Asiana Airlines’ Boeing 777, which crash-landed in San Francisco Saturday claiming two lives and injuring over a hundred, was flown by one of the best qualified and most experienced pilots at Korea’s No. 2 carrier.
A source familiar with the issue said Sunday that the 49-year-old, Lee Jeong-min, had more than 25 years experience flying both military fighters and large-sized commercial aircraft.
“In the Air Force, Lee was selected to fly the F-4 because he was one of the best fighter pilots with the F-5 which all Korean fighter pilots start with. After serving in the military for 10 years, he joined Asiana in 1996,” said the source who asked to remain anonymous.
“He was also a leading expert in big-sized commercial aircraft.”
A blame game is expected to follow the crash.
Although both sides trying to avoid speculation, Korean experts tend to stress that the chief pilot was experienced and those in the cockpit were aware that the airplane was in trouble while landing.
(Excerpt) Read more at koreatimes.co.kr ...
Something’s not right. News reports saying an in training pilot was doing the landing. I guess it’ll take a couple of weeks for the real story to come out. I’m sure the NTSB is on it right now.
Not a mutually-exclusive statement with the “training” one. The key question is “how many hours in a 777?” and the answer appears to be 43 hours.
I’m reading this as he’s taking the blame for not correcting the new captain. As somebody wrote on another thread, saving face all the way to impact.
A report on FNC compared the descent of the crashed flight to the one that landed Friday. The flight that crashed descended at a much steeper angle than the one on Friday.
It was not caused by any technical fault in the plane, but was in fact human error: The plane's captain had allowed his son, also a pilot, but one not certified to fly the N-22, to take the controls in flight. At this point, a mechanical malfunction occurred, caused not by a design flaw at Norton but by poor maintenance practices at Transpacific Airlines. The son panicked and attempted to correct the problem, unaware that the plane already had a failsafe system for such an event. The conflicting control signals caused the plane to maneuver wildly, causing the fatalities.
The pilot was indeed a veteran pilot with over 10,000 hours of flying experience, but he was TRAINING on the Boeing 777 and hadn’t flown to SFO in the past 10 years. Not familiar with either the airport or the plane.
Asiana says pilot of crashed plane was in training
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3040164/posts
I am not a pilot, but my SIL is, and has a job training other pilots in aviation safety of various aircraft.
My wife and daughter both got to "play" in the simulator they use. That simulator can duplicate almost any flight situations and has software that has every major airport approach pattern. He can change wind speed or other factors with the push of a key.
Both got to try to land a 737, which he says is one of the easiest passenger aircraft to land. Both crashed well before the "end of the runway".
Thousands of hours in one aircraft doesn't matter when a pilot gets behind the controls of the newer aircraft. 43 hours in a 777 after flying older 737s or smaller aircraft is not a good idea.
The way the news was reporting it, they were saying it was a training pilot at the controls. This makes it a different story. Yet again.
Just too many variations on the story right now. When has the MSM ever had a correct version of anything they report.
That’s the problem with partial truths — they can be quite misleading.
I subscribe to the NTSB Reporter. I’ll get the true lowdown on the whole thing. The MSM notwithstanding.
“The conflicting control signals caused the plane to maneuver wildly, causing the fatalities.”
Cue the 1988 Paris Air Show Airbus crash.
Two experienced pilots, one TOP pilot in charge of training, and one new pilot.
My guess is that they were letting him make some mistakes to learn how to recover.
This plane has come in lower on previous flights and made it. This time it came in on a normal approach and then went too slow. Sounds like a trainee thing.
NOTE: the RED LINE is the day of the crash.
Interesting that they didn’t crash on the July 5th. approach. They were so close together.
See post #14
Maybe it was the same pilot. On the 5th, the plane was WAY LOW to begin with.
On the 6th, it is very similar to the rest of the days, but near the end he slows too much and loses altitude too soon. A stall.
I think there are still some essential pieces of the story missing.
As someone who have never flown an aircraft outside of a primitive simulator game, I would say that the red line is perfectly reasonable almost to the end. The plateau in the middle is probably commanded by the tower, and it's probably just dialed in (the cyan line of July 5th is particularly obvious in this regard, being unerringly flat at 5,000 feet for so long.)
The only difference is in the last two or three intervals, where the red line dips under all other lines and becomes the lowest flying aircraft of all five that are plotted.
read reports that 2 seconds or so before impact the stall alarm went off.
so what happened seems pretty clear, the plane came in below speed, stalled and pancaked.
why that happened, as yet undetermined.
My wife and I are aviation enthusiasts who own an airplane and live on an airport. We started out with hang gliders and ultralights and then got into general aviation aircraft. The difference between a good landing and a crash landing is often just a few feet or a few miles per hour. I am not sure that the graph is really all that relevant.
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