Runway 28L at SFO
Apparently FL 214 was low enough to hit its tail on the sea-wall.
Posted on 07/08/2013 4:28:02 AM PDT by servo1969
Asiana Airlines said Monday that the pilot in control of the Boeing 777 that crashed in San Francisco Saturday had little experience flying that type of plane and was landing one for the first time at that airport.
Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyomin told the Associated Press Monday that Lee Gang-guk was trying to get used to the 777 during Saturday's crash landing. She says the pilot had nearly 10,000 hours flying other planes, including the Boeing 747, but had only 43 hours on the 777.
Hyomin told Reuters that co-pilot Lee Jeong-min has 3,220 hours of flying experience with the Boeing 777 and a total of 12,387 hours of flying experience, and was helping his colleague with the landing.
In all, four pilots were on the plane and worked in rotating shifts during the 10-and-a-half hour flight from Seoul. The pilots were described by Asiana chief executive Yoon Young-doo Sunday as veterans, with more than 10,000 hours of flight experience. "And one pilot has 9,000, almost 10,000 hours' experience," he said.
On Sunday, a National Transportation Safety Board official said a preliminary review of recordings taken from the black boxes of an Asiana Boeing 777 flight that crash-landed into San Francisco International Airport Saturday showed that the plane was traveling “significantly” slower than normal on its descent before the crew called for more acceleration and another chance to land.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Apparently its not uncommon. After all, everybody has to land somewhere for the first time.
Not with passengers on board.
Korean pilots again.
It’s not like they don’t have a history.
Actually they do. They apparently qualify on a simulator simply because the cost of practicing in a full sized empty plane at a closed airport is cost prohibitive.
BBC has better reporting without the search for scalps.
He didn’t do so good
His first and last landing of the 777.
Working in medicine, I know that there is always a first time to “try it for real” on nearly everything.
You can practice suturing on pigs, injecting on dummies and oranges, etc. but at some point...you have to do it for real.
Of course, at that point, nobody just says “Here you go...put in this heart valve now...” as they hand them a tray of surgical implements. You have to do things for real under strict supervision for a while. When you have shown reliably that you can competently handle certain tasks, the supervision is gradually removed (sometimes not so gradually, depending on the task) until the person completes a predetermined number of tasks and is doing it unsupervised.
Even if this pilot only had 30 hours in type, I would have assumed that this pilot was landing the plane with someone qualified watching every parameter closely, flight path, altitude, airspeed, etc., with the following dialogue:
SUPERVISING PILOT: “Okay, you’re low. Bring it up....up. Okay, good. Watch your airspeed. A little more...okay...”
But as we all know, people get lazy, and people are people. It could be that the supervising pilot (if there is one) might just assume the guy is good because he has 10,000 hours in a 737 and has a reputation as a good pilot. Or, there could be that he didn’t want to offend a guy who was a top-notch fighter pilot by correcting him because the guy was known to bite people’s heads off when he gets corrected.
For all we know it could be a cultural thing.
This is all conjecture, because while I do know a little about aviation from having been a jet mechanic in the USN, I really don’t know much about the civilian pilot culture, the processes and demands. Perhaps one of our Freepers who does will chime in on how this works. For example, even if he had only 30 hours actual time in type, did he have 500 hours of simulator time, and what does that count for?
Actually, they DO have to do it for the first time at some point with passengers on board.
In medicine, a surgeon can only practice on cadavers and pigs so often before you finally do it on a real person who needs surgery. As I said in the other posting, you would hope there would be someone with experience who would say “Hm. Remember to pull that artery aside when you do such and such...” or whatever.
According to the rest of the article:
“seven seconds before the plane hit into a seawall, one of the crew members called on the pilots to increase speed. Information from the flight data recorder said the plane was going below the target landing speed, and the engine throttles advanced.
Four seconds before impact, a “stick shaker” – a device that emits an oral and physical warning to the crew that the plane is about to stall – sounded off, Hersman said.
The crew then asked to abort the landing and make another attempt 1.5 seconds before impact.”
There were apparently 4 pilots on the plane. My opinion is that one of the supervising pilots wasn’t attentive enough.
The airport runway doesn’t move around like a carrier. The ILS was not operating because the weather was ideal for visual and is the only time they can work on it.
Besides, the aircraft also has glide slope systems on it as well. If you look at the glide slope graph for this fight days before and compare it to Saturday, they were way off, actually they were low way out, gained some altitude and came down again, well below the historical landing glide slope.
I saw this on a six or seven day comparison graph. Either they were so arrogant not to interrupt a senior pilot or there was something else going on that the FDR will show. The fact that they were not talking about it on the CFR is of high concern.
Should HAVE, not should of.
(signed)
The FR Grammar Police
How stupid of someone with no experience to be put in charge.
correction, CVR, not CFR.
I have a feeling the Captain on this flight is going to eat it big time unless there were very extenuating circumstances.
and last
He had almost 10,000 hours in a 747 with several landings at SFO in that plane. So he was not a rookie. The fact that nobody caught the erratic glide slope is of huge concern. Not only for the 4 pilots, but also for the avionics and landing ATC.
All that idiot pictured did was stay at a Holiday Inn Express.
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