Asiana pilot in San Francisco crash had no experience flying 777

The pilot in control of the Boeing 777 that crashed in San Francisco had little experience flying that type of plane and was landing one for the first time at that airport, his bosses said.

The pilot in control of the Boeing 777 that crashed in San Francisco had little experience flying that type of plane and was landing one for the first time at that airport, his bosses said.

Asiana Airlines spokeswoman Lee Hyomin said Lee Gang-guk was trying to get used to the 777 during Saturday’s crash landing. She said the pilot had nearly 10,000 hours flying other planes but had only 43 hours on the 777.

Accident investigators are trying to determine whether pilot error, mechanical problems or something else was to blame for the crash.

The head of the US National Transportation Safety Board said earlier that the pilots of the doomed Flight 214 were flying too slowly as they approached the airport and tried to abort the landing, but crashed barely a second later.

Investigators also believe rescue crews could have run over one of the two teenagers killed in the crash. Chinese state media identified the dead as two 16-year-old girls, Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, from the country’s eastern Zhejiang province.

San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said senior San Francisco Fire Department officials notified him and his staff at the crash site on Saturday that one of the girls may have been struck on the runaway. Mr Foucrault said a post-mortem examination will involve determining whether the girl’s death was caused by injuries suffered in the crash or “a secondary incident”. He said one of the bodies was found on the tarmac near where the plane’s tail broke off when it slammed into the runway. The other was found on the left side of the plane about 30 feet away from where the jet came to rest after it skidded down the runway.

US safety experts said the Boeing 777’s pilots triggered a control board warning that the jet could stall, then tried to abort the landing seconds before crashing. The plane was travelling well below the target landing speed of 137 knots per hour, or 157mph, National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah Hersman said at a briefing on the crash. “We’re not talking about a few knots,” she said.

Ms Hersman said the aircraft’s stick shaker – a piece of safety equipment that warns pilots of an impending stall – went off moments before the crash. The normal response to a stall warning is to increase speed to recover control. There was an increase several seconds before the crash, she said, basing her comments on an evaluation of the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that contain hundreds of different types of information on what happened to the plane. At 1.5 seconds before impact, there was a call for an aborted landing, she said.

The new details helped shed light on the final moments of Flight 214 as the crew tried desperately to climb back into the sky, and confirmed what survivors and other witnesses said they saw: a slow-moving airliner. Pilots normally try to land at the target speed, in this case 137 knots, plus an additional five more knots, said Bob Coffman, an American Airlines captain who has flown 777s.

The plane’s Pratt & Whitney engines were on idle, Ms Hersman said. The normal procedure in the Boeing 777, a wide-body jet, would be to use the autopilot and the throttle to provide power to the engine all the way through to landing, Mr Coffman said. There was no indication in the discussions between the pilots and the air traffic controllers that there were problems with the aircraft.

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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