Free Republic

<p>If a driver were involved in a crash locally and alcohol or drugs could have been an issue, police will usually have the driver tested. It wouldn’t matter if he or she were a tourist from another country, or a visitor here to do some corporate business.</p>

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...

The flying pilot of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 told National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials that he was "blinded" temporarily by a flash of light at 500 feet, or 34 seconds before impact -- about the same time the pilots realized they were flying too low and going too slow. The NTSB doesn't know what caused the flash, and is continuing to investigate. At Wednesday's NTSB briefing, NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman released information from the board's investigation. She detailed who was on the crew, the communications between air traffic control and the Asiana pilots, and the plane's evacuation. Evacuation delayed...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Oh, yeah. If you go to Twitter, if you go to Facebook -- hell, if you go to comments, anywhere -- "It's so racist! It's just offensive as it can be. I can't believe people actually thought these were real." I can just see these little people in their pajamas writing these comments on Twitter over what happened on KTVU Channel 2 (I think it's Channel 2) in Oakland, in the Bay Area. It's a Fox affiliate, and that probably ticked 'em off even more. You had this clueless infobabe. I mean, folks, I hope you've had...

Asiana 214 – A Failure of Standardized Procedures? By Bruce Croft – www.twozerowest.com In her final on-site briefing NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman added what are in my view two final but highly significant pieces of factual information contributing to the investigation into the cause of the crash of Asiana 214. We learned that there was conversation about being above, then on, and then below the glidepath for the approach – in that order, and we also learned that there was no mention of the aircraft’s speed until a little less than nine seconds prior to impact.  What these facts taken...

Both the (Transportation Safety Board") and KTVU-TV of Oakland, Calif., have apologized for a mistake that led the television station to broadcast incorrect – and racially insensitive – names of the pilots of Asiana Flight 214, which crashed at San Francisco airport July 6, killing three. But the airline is considering legal action against the two organizations, (CNN reports). KTVU on Friday reported what it thought were the names of the Asiana pilots, but the names were clearly fabrications intended as crude phonetic jokes. One of the pilot names reported by KTVU, for instance, was "Wi Tu Lo."

This would be the intern who confirmed to local news station KTVU that the Asiana Airlines pilots who crash-landed that plane in San Francisco were named Sum Ting Wong, Ho Lee xxx, and so on. It's still unclear why the intern did this, or why KTVU asked the intern to do this. Everyone is terrible.

After I retired from UAL as a Standards Captain on the -400, I got a job as a simulator instructor working for Alteon (a Boeing subsidiary) at Asiana. When I first got there, I was shocked and surprised by the lack of basic piloting skills shown by most of the pilots. It is not a normal situation with normal progression from new hire, right seat, left seat taking a decade or two. One big difference is that ex-Military pilots are given super-seniority and progress to the left seat much faster. Compared to the US, they also upgrade fairly rapidly because...

U.S. authorities couldn’t perform drug or alcohol tests on the four pilots who were aboard Asiana Flight 214 when it crashed at San Francisco International Airport — a lapse that will complicate efforts to figure out why they were seemingly unaware that the plane was coming in too slowly and too low. Those were the latest revelations Tuesday from National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Debbie Hersman, who said her agency and the Federal Aviation Administration couldn’t legally requirethe crew of the South Korea-based airline to submit to testing after the crash. That decision is left to the airline’s home country....

Reports indicate that passengers aboard crashed Asiana Flight 214 were trapped by their seatbelts while the Boeing 777 burned around them. If only someone had a knife to cut them free, even a small pocketknife… But nobody had any kind of knife, because knives aren’t allowed on flights that land or originate in the United States. So what happened? ... police officers on the ground threw utility knives up to crew members so they could cut the seat belts of those who remained trapped as rescue crews removed the injured. You read that correctly: passengers were trapped in the burning...

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...

I used the data for Asiana Flight 214 from FlightAware to create a series of graphs to help Freepers understand how the approach to landing deviated from the expected behavior. This data is collected from the FAA computer systems. The location data is either calculated by the FAA radar or reported by the aircraft transponder. The altitude is reported by the aircraft transponder. The ground speed and vertical descent rate is most likely reported by the aircraft's Mode S transponder, but it's possible these were computed by the radar system. This first graph is a plot of the latitude/longitude in...

A Boeing 777 passenger jetliner bound from Seoul, South Korea, crashed and caught fire while landing at San Francisco International Airport at about 11:30 Saturday. The plane, Asiana Flight 214, came to rest on the side of the runway. The airport remains closed to all traffic and emergency teams are on the scene.

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...

A San Francisco-area coroner whose office received the bodies of two teenage victims of the Asiana plane crash says officials are conducting an autopsy to determine if one of the girls was run over and killed by a rescue vehicle. San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault says Sunday that senior San Francisco Fire Department officials notified him and his staff at the crash site on Saturday that one of the 16-year-olds may have been struck on the runaway. Foucrault says an autopsy he expects to be completed by Monday will involve determining whether the girl's death was caused by injuries...

Sarah Barracuda posted this link to another thread. Asked that someone post a thread

"...Investigators also said they were looking into the possibility that rescue crews ran over one of the two teenagers killed in the crash on Saturday. Officials released the details without explaining why the pilots were flying so slow - or why rescue officials didn't see the girl..."

The Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 that crashed at San Francisco's airport on Saturday was traveling "significantly below" its intended speed and its crew tried to abort the landing just seconds before it hit the seawall in front of the runway, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said on Sunday. Information collected from the plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder indicated that there were no signs of trouble until seven seconds before impact, when the crew tried to accelerate, NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said at a news conference at the airport. A stall warning sounded four seconds before impact,...

Asiana Airlines Inc said the pilot in charge of landing the Boeing 777 that crash-landed at San Francisco's airport on Saturday was training for the long-range plane and that it was his first flight to the airport with the jet. "It was Lee Kang-kook's maiden flight to the airport with the jet... He was in training. Even a veteran gets training (for a new jet)," a spokeswoman for Asiana Airlines said on Monday. "He has a lot of experience and previously flown to San Francisco on different planes including the B747... and he was assisted by another pilot who has...

A photo shared on Twitter by one of the passengers [Twitter / @Eunner ] An Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul, South Korea, has crashed while landing at San Francisco airport, US federal aviation officials have said.According to the Reuters news agency there were two fatalities in the crash, as well as an unknown number of injuries.Al Jazeera's Matt McFetridge, reporting from San Francisco, said that local radio was also reporting the fatalities."We've got reports of at least 16 passengers at two very good hospitals in San Francisco," our correspondent said."We have not heard official confirmation of the two fatalities."What...