Asiana Pilots Interviewed on Why Crashed Plane Slowed

The plane had slowed to almost 40 miles an hour below its target speed before hitting a seawall short of the runway, a U.S. investigator said. Crash investigators said they don't yet know why the plane was moving so slowly it was on the verge of losing lift or why the pilots took no evasive action until seven seconds before impact. All but two of the 307 people on board survived.

In this handout photo provided by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the Asiana Airlines flight 214 flight data recorder, left, and the cockpit voice recorder are displayed in the NTSB's laboratory in Washington, D.C., on July 7, 2013. Source: NTSB via Getty Images

Asiana Airlines Inc. Chief Executive Officer Yoon Young Doo speaks during a news conference at the company's headquarters in Seoul, on July 7, 2013. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg

A twin-engine Boeing Co. 777, operated by Seoul-based Asiana Airlines Inc., lies burned on the runway after it crash landed at San Francisco International Airport on July 6, 2013. Photographer: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Lee was in training to fly the 777 aircraft, Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyo Min said by phone today in Seoul. The 46-year-old has flown a total of 9,793 hours, 43 of which were on a 777, according to South Korea's Transport Ministry. The other pilot, Lee Jung Min, 49, has flown a total of 12,387 hours, 3,220 on a Boeing 777, the ministry said.
Investigators yesterday began interviewing the pilots, with the process slowed by language barriers, according to U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Debbie Hersman.

"I am looking forward to having the crew interviews done," Hersman said in an interview yesterday. "It's going very slowly. We want to make sure the crew members aren't confused, that the information that's being exchanged is clear, that we're getting out of it all the information that we need."

Two other pilots provided relief on the flight from Seoul, Hersman said earlier in a briefing yesterday.

Flung Rocks
How the pilots set the auto-throttle will be part of the NTSB's probe, Hersman said. The device flies the plane at a speed selected by pilots and has built-in functions to keep the plane from slowing too much.

"We're certainly exploring the automation in the aircraft and how it was used," she said.

The plane's impact flung rocks hundreds of feet down the runway an
d tore off parts of the plane that came to rest in San Francisco Bay, Hersman said.

While the plane didn't make any unusual descents or turns as it flew across the bay toward the runway, its speed fell to dangerous levels as it got lower, Hersman said in the briefing, citing preliminary information from crash-proof recorders.

The pilot flying the plane turned off the autopilot at 1,600 feet altitude 82 seconds before the crash, she said. At 1,400 feet altitude a few seconds later, the plane was flying at 196 mph, she said.

The speed fell as the aircraft neared the runway, dropping below the target landing speed of 158 mph. It got as low as 119 mph three seconds before impact, she said.

Cockpit Warning
The aircraft slowed so much that a cockpit warning of an impending aerodynamic stall sounded four seconds before it crash-landed.

"They got way slow," Mark Epperson, a retired Boeing 767 captain and former chief pilot for American Airlines Inc. (AMR1) in San Francisco, said in an interview. "That means the auto-throttles either weren't on, or they selected a speed that shouldn't have happened."

It was the first fatal crash in the U.S. of a large jet since 2001, and Seoul-based Asiana's first such accident since a Boeing 747 cargo plane went down at sea in July 2011.
Six people remained in critical condition at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center at 11 a.m. local time yesterday, Rachael Kagan, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement.

Fire Truck
Hersman said investigators so far can't confirm a report in media including the San Francisco Chronicle that one of the two victims who died, a 16-year-old Chinese girl, may have been run over by a fire-rescue vehicle rushing to the scene rather than killed in the crash. Video isn't clear enough to determine what happened, she said.
Jeff Gilbert, a director of the California State Firefighters Association board, said he couldn't say directly whether a fire truck hit one of the girls.

"It could have been very hard to see a body within the debris," Gilbert said in an interview. "It could have been very chaotic. I would just say the San Francisco Fire Department must have noticed something to contact them with that risk as a possible scenario. There's something that the San Francisco Fire Department must have seen," he said.
A so-called glide-slope indicator, which gives pilots a steady descent path, hadn't been working since June on the Asiana flight's runway due to construction. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had posted a "notice to airmen" warning of the shutdown.

With the glide-scope indicator out, it would be normal procedure for the pilots to turn off the auto-pilot to do a visual approach, Epperson said. If the inexperienced pilot was attempting a manual landing, "then the check airman should've been way ahead of that," he said.

Visual Approach
The Asiana flight had been cleared for a visual approach and didn't need the glide-slope indicator to land, Hersman said in a briefing yesterday.

To prevent a plane from going into a stall, which can cause it to lose lift and plummet, cockpits are equipped with a warning system known as a stick shaker. When a plane gets within a few miles an hour of stalling, a device vibrates the control yoke and makes a loud thumping noise.

"It is inappropriate to prejudge that pilots were responsible for the crash, or that there were problems with the aircraft, while the investigation is ongoing," Choi Jung Ho, an official at the South Korean transport ministry, told reporters yesterday. Control is "easily transferable" between pilots depending on flight situation, said Choi Seung Yeon, another ministry official.

Too Slow
In investigating the last fatal U.S. airline accident, a 2009 crash involving Pinnacle Airlines Corp. (PNCLQ)'s Colgan unit in Buffalo, New York, the NTSB found the pilots also allowed their plane to get too slow, which also prompted a stick-shaker alert. That alert triggered an abrupt series of maneuvers that caused the plane to go out of control, the safety board found.

It's common for U.S. airline pilots to land aircraft like the 777-200 with relatively few hours of experience and under the watchful eye of instructors known as check airmen, Epperson said.

"You don't know where the wheels are until you fly it a few times," Epperson said. "You're more cautious, going to flair a little bit higher, round out the landing more."

The Asiana crew "ran out of ideas, air speed and altitude all at the same time," he added.

To contact the reporters on this story: Alan Levin in San Francisco at alevin24@bloomberg.net; Kyunghee Park in Seoul at kpark3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bernard Kohn at bkohn2@bloomberg.net; Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net

Source: BLOOMBERG