Asiana Pilot Set Throttles He Didn’t Understand to Idle

SF Gate ^ | December 11, 2013 | Alan Levin and Jeff Plungis

[Zhang Fei]

An Asiana Airlines Inc. captain nervous about making a manual landing in San Francisco inadvertently disabled a speed-control system before the plane crashed into a seawall on July 6, documents show.

Lee Kang Kuk, a veteran pilot with Seoul-based Asiana who was being trained on the Boeing Co. 777-200ER wide-body, had momentarily adjusted the power without realizing the plane’s computers then assumed he wanted the engines to remain at idle, according to information released today at a U.S. National Transportation Safety Board hearing.

The documents, while showing the pilots made errors, raise questions about how auto-throttles on Boeing planes are designed and whether there’s enough training on using them. The safety board hasn’t concluded what caused the crash, which killed three teenage girls from China in the first U.S. airline accident with deaths since 2009.

Lee, 45, “believed the auto-throttle should have come out of the idle position to prevent the airplane going below the minimum speed” for landing, the NTSB said in a summary of an interview with him. “That was the theory at least, as he understood it.”

In most modes of operation, the speed-protection system on the 777 and several other Boeing aircraft won’t allow planes to slow too much, safeguarding against accidents such as the Asiana crash. The plane, on the verge of losing lift because it was almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) per hour slower than its target speed, broke apart after hitting the ground.

[Zhang Fei]

Most asian pilots don’t know how to manually fly a plane.

The guy who wrote the article claimed to have worked as an Asiana flight instructor, so I'd say that unless instructors at other airlines chime in, it's an Asiana-specific phenomenon. Probably boils down to money - more time spent training => less time per pilot spent flying passengers and goods => more pilots required => more salary expense.

[Vermont Lt]

According to the book of Arnold, the system has become self aware.

[Don Corleone]

Actually, not. There was an American pilot that trained airline pilots in the east. He said that there were many other problems that were from their cultural background — like never questioning anyone higher in command. They also did not like to get their “hands dirty” by flying it themselves rather than letting the autopilot do it.

This is true, true, true. Also the company manuals call for the pilot to put the Aircraft into automatic control as soon as possible after take off and leave it there for the whole flight if possible. IOW many of these guys have VERY LITTLE actual stick time, maybe 3 or 4 minutes on a 14 hour flight. They are accidents looking for places to happen and have been very successful at that objective over the last few years.