The South Korean jetliner that crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport
on Saturday was flying far too slowly to reach the runway and began to
stall just before the pilot gunned his engines in a futile effort to
abort the landing, the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.
The investigation into the crash
of the Boeing 777 came to focus more sharply on possible pilot error
Sunday as the president of Asiana Airlines ruled out a mechanical
failure and federal investigators sought to interview the cockpit crew.
National Transportation Safety Board head
Deborah Hersman provides the latest details on the the Asiana Airlines
flight that crashed on the runway at San Francisco International
Airport, saying investigators are "very thankful there weren't more
fatalities."
“We’re not talking about a few knots here or there. It was
significantly below the 137 knots” required for the approach, NTSB
Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman said in describing data taken from the
cockpit and flight data recorders. “We do hope to interview the crew
members within the next few days.”
Hersman said the cockpit
recorder revealed that seven seconds before impact there was a call to
increase the plane’s speed.
Three seconds later a “stick shaker” — a
violent vibration of the control yoke intended to be a warning to the
pilot — indicated the plane was about to stall. Just 11
/
2 seconds before impact, a crew member called out to abort the landing.
Hersman said her agency was a long way — perhaps months — from reaching a conclusion on what caused the crash.
But with Asiana insisting there was no mechanical failure, the data
from the flight recorders showing the plane far below appropriate speed
and the fact that the pilots were controlling the plane in what is
called a “visual approach,” the available evidence Sunday suggested the
crew was at fault.
On Monday, Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyomin said
that Lee Gang-guk, the pilot in control of the Boeing 777, had little
experience flying that kind of plane.
She told the Associated Press that
it was the pilot’s first time landing in San Francisco and that he had
nearly 10,000 hours flying other planes but only 43 hours on the 777.
Two
Chinese teenagers were killed and scores of passengers were injured
just before noon Saturday when the Boeing 777 airliner struck a sea wall
at the end of the runway tail first and skidded about 2,000 feet before
catching fire.
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