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Asiana Airlines Flight 214: A Pilot’s Perspective
- ColinWright 13y agoSingle page: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/20...
- furilo 13y agothe article hardly says anything... (more than dont believe what media provides, which again is nothing new)
- ekianjo 13y agoYeah, its really an article full of air. Sounds right from a pilot's perspective.
- greghinch 13y agoSo you would have preferred the pilot author make different uninformed, speculative claims about the cause of the crash? That's the whole point: no one reporting on or writing about this has all the facts yet
- furilo 13y ago> no one reporting on or writing about this has all the facts yet yep, that is implicit in the lack of an official and conclusive report. But I have spent 10 minutes reading the article waiting for something interesting, and he just says nothing apart from wait for the official info, dont speculate. which is the default mindset of many. but yes, there might be a whole lot of other people who needs to read this carefully ;)
- Avenger42 13y agoThe point of the article is to wait until the official report is released before jumping up and down on an innocent party. As has happened in many other situations, the media circus surrounding an unfortunate event can cause people to prejudge, and sometimes they don't stick around to learn the truth. Case in point: I was reading something recently (can't remember what) where the author pointed out that many people still believe Richard Jewell [1] to be the Atlanta bomber. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell
- chiph 13y agoProbably the best take-away is that the media is sensationalizing this, primarily because there hasn't been a crash by a major airline in over 10 years.
- supercanuck 13y agothat and to leave your damn carry-ons behind in an emergency since you are slowing the process of getting everyone off the plane.
- chiph 13y agoAnyone who has had to wait while someone goes "against the flow" to retrieve their bag from the overhead (because the bin above their seat was full when they sat down) knows this pain. In an emergency, that delay could kill someone. When Boeing designed the 787, the composite construction allowed for larger windows. I wonder if it allows for larger emergency exit openings too.
- Shivetya 13y agoNone with fatalities, however in 09 US Airways Flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson to much fanfare. There have also been accidents with fatalities involving feeder airlines to the majors within the US. Outside the US is another story entirely, but we tend to ignore most of the accidents unless the numbers are large. The interest I have in stories like this are, how many are preventable by having systems that can override a pilot and is there and preference to doing such?
- a3n 13y agoLook at your bug database. Multiply that by the complexity of not only an airliner, but the huge and complex system in which it operates. Add weight for consequences in human fatalities. Now, would you prefer that system overriding the pilot, or the other way around? Humans can think outside the box. Software is the box.
- Kurtz79 13y ago
- rossjudson 13y agoGreat and sensible article. Read this because it "pops the bubble" of some of the popular memes floating around, providing details on what it means to have low hours in a type, or whether Korean pilots have "perceived seniority" issues in the cockpit. I note that checked bags cannot block passengers from escaping an aircraft. Perhaps someone will someday quantify the additional risk airlines forced on passengers when they started charging for every bag.
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago> I note that checked bags cannot block passengers from escaping an aircraft. Perhaps not, but people standing in the aisle reaching to get them, dropped bags people trip over and block the aisle, etc do.
- nknighthb 13y agoChecked baggage is not accessible from within the cabin.
- madeofpalk 13y agoChecked bags, as in baggage stowed in the luggage compartment and not what you carry on.
- joezydeco 13y agoPatrick Smith wrote the "Ask the Pilot" column for Salon.com for 10 years, ending last year. His writing was always very insightful and very entertaining at the same time. One of my favorites: http://www.askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/the-exploding-toilet/ http://www.askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/the-exploding-to... It seems he came back to slate.com as a one-time thing, but you can read his archived work at Salon and at www.askthepilot.com. He seems to have a book as well now.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoThat's everyone's favorite "Ask the Pilot".
- danso 13y ago> But consider for a moment the year 1985, one of the darkest ever for commercial air travel. By the end of that year, 27 crashes had resulted in the deaths of almost 2,400 people. These included the Air India bombing over the North Atlantic, with 329 casualties, and, two months later, the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123 outside Tokyo, with 520 dead. (These, the second- and fifth-deadliest incidents in aviation history, happened 49 days apart.) Also in 1985 were the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed more than 240 U.S. servicemen, the infamous British Airtours 737 fire, and the crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed 137. Wow, the number of fatalities that year is incomprehensible by today's standards. Yes, this accident has made big news because so few accidents have happened in this decade...but I'd say that today's news cycle has served to amplify just about everything, no matter what their statistical, relative, or absolute significance.
- ekianjo 13y agoSo it's ok to forgive Pilots' incompetence just because statistics say it doesn't happen a lot?
- danso 13y agoIs it OK to forgive the dozens of incompetent car drivers who kill people on a daily basis? And if not, how would you feel if each fatal accident was given such national news treatment (if there were enough bandwidth to do so, which, theoretically, there is) My comment is not about the culpability of the pilots, but the long recognized psychological phenomenon of overestimating risk probabilities due to increased "hearing of" incidents, rare or not, the cause being irrelevant.
- ekianjo 13y agoBecause each driver is not responsible for 300 lives in their cars. That's why there is so much attention to plane crashes. It doesn't kill one person at a time. Besides, it's incredible such an accident happen when the weather is perfect, there is no wind, it's not at night, the plane is working just fine, and it's just a couple of pilots who don't know what they are doing because they don't know how to land a plan manually since they are used to pressing buttons the whole time and relyong on autopilot. That's what the news is about. Just like the AF447 crash between Rio and Paris: Pilots incompetence at its best.
- nilkn 13y agoFlightAware has radar data chronicling the crash: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/0730Z/RKSI/KSFO/tracklog https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/... The NY Times made a nice graph with it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-uneven-descent.html?ref=us&_r=2& http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-u...
- takluyver 13y agoThat graph doesn't seem very meaningful. It compares the descent with the a perfectly smooth curve, but there's no indication of how much variation you can expect in normal landings. It would be much more interesting to see that descent and the ten before it overlaid, for example.
- frenchman_in_ny 13y agoThe FlightAware data isn't particularly accurate, and the update frequency nowhere near fast enough to get good information (vs. FDR). For the less sensationalist view of the crash and analysis, see the AVHerald information [1] [1] http://avherald.com/h?article=464ef64f&opt=0 http://avherald.com/h?article=464ef64f&opt=0
- wslh 13y agoI saw another opinion on Philip Greenspun's blog: My visual approach, and Asiana’s http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/07/07/my-visual-approach-and-asianas/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/07/07/my-visual-appr... He is an amateur pilot.
- edw519 13y agoOff topic but of significant hacker interest: Also in 1985...the crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed 137. There's always been a lot of speculation over how IBM gave up an entire industry (the personal computer) to a seemingly insignificant start-up (Microsoft). One theory is that may not have happened if Don Estridge hadn't been killed in that crash. More about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Don_Estridge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Don_Estridge and here: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/05/us/philip-estridge-dies-in-jet-crash-guided-ibm-personal-computer.html http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/05/us/philip-estridge-dies-in... Of particular note: "His most revolutionary move was to make the computer's design specifications public, allowing thousands of young people to write programs for the machine." We take it for granted now, but before Don Estridge and the IBM PC, "proprietary" was the rule and "open" was the exception. RIP
- vasundhar 13y agoNow I understood the policy not to book more than 4 employees on same plane. RIP
- beachstartup 13y agodepending on the size of the company, it could be no more than 1. i was in a car accident with my ENTIRE team one time. minor, but scary. to quote ... shit happens.
- ngoel36 13y agoI'm a former Google employee, they had a similar policy. There were no more than x employees per team allowed on the same plane, above a certain seniority level, only one per plane.
- nostrademons 13y agoThe irony is that there's no such policy for buses, which in many ways are less safe than planes. One catastrophic bus crash on the way to Tahoe could conceivably wipe out most of search quality, or any other department.
- yread 13y ago> It’s not yet clear which Asiana pilot was physically at the controls, the captain or first officer That's not true http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/07/08/200086858/asiana-crash-plane-was-34-knots-below-target-speed-ntsb-says http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/07/08/200086858/asi... We already know that the captain in training was flying. We also already know that a cockpit with 4 experienced pilots let the airspeed fall below vref for 30 seconds before doing anything. Really good article!
- snowwrestler 13y ago> Early theories as to why a plane crashed almost always turn out to be wrong or incomplete. In the Air France crash over the Atlantic, the early theories all centered around the loss of airspeed indicators--a mechanical problem. When the flight recorders were finally found (an astounding feat of salvage BTW), it turned out that the airspeed indicators did fail...but then they came back online, and the pilots flew a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean anyway. So as we look at this SFO crash, the lessons from Air France are mixed. On the one hand it's possible that the early theories of pilot error will be wrong, and it will be some subtle or previously unknown software or hardware error. On the other hand we know that modern highly trained pilots can make enough wrong decisions in a row to crash a sound airplane.
- gadders 13y agoReading the account of that crash was scary. One pilot diving, one pulling up. and as a result the plane crashed.
- Moral_ 13y agoFor those who want to read the story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/9231855/Air-France-Flight-447-Damn-it-were-going-to-crash.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/9231855/Air-France-Fli...
- tonylemesmer 13y agoSeems like the "I have control" "you have control" thing went out the window pretty quickly. Very chilling account to read.
- scott_karana 13y agoI've always considered that a cautionary tale on interface design. The linked yokes in an Airbus to average their inputs without force feedback, unless one yoke or the other is explicitly disabled. The experienced pilot had no idea that his co-pilot was stalling the plane the entire time.
- 13y ago
- kailuowang 13y agoI can't believe I read this article on HN. People died due to some human error (if it's not the weather it must be some human error somewhere) and the public wants to know why. Media is serving that demand, it could be over-speculating but it doesn't mean that a polit should feel obliged to start defending the engineers on the expense of first categorizing it as a non-catastrophe and then blame the passengers. To me, listing all the past tragedies to make the point that this one doesn't deserve the public attention is at the very least inconsiderate if not offensive.
- driverdan 13y agoAs the article said, stop speculating. You don't know it was caused by human error. Wait for the data to be analyzed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rogerchucker 13y agoYeah but he seems to take the liberty to speculate that passengers were being selfish in lugging their carry-ons down the aisle while evacuating and endangering others' lives. Unless anybody actually complained about this being an issue in the evacuation process, he's not sticking to the facts either. So please, let's stop with the "let's not speculate" garbage. Everybody will do it. He's just trying to cover for his industry and the people in his profession.
- trestles 13y agoI agree - there was an egregious failure here and if it was due to somehting that could be fixed than it should be. Nobody is asking for a lynching or anything.
- takluyver 13y agoAnd I've no doubt that people whose job it is are already sorting through the available data to work out exactly what did go wrong and whether it's something that can be fixed. But breathless speculation based on the fragments of information available to the media isn't going to make that go any faster.
- LaGrange 13y agoThis is a great article, with one exception: There have been a handful involving regional affiliates, but the majors have been virtually accident-free Now, I realize that even including those the stats are still fairly good, but it makes the "virtually accident-free" stats of majors a result of spinning off risk to affiliates, which is not something a consumer should care about. It might be a bit of a nit-pick (as it's still a handful), but moving things into different brands to avoid stigma is a common and, in my opinion, unhealthy practice.
- smackfu 13y agoAgreed. Those two flights that crashed were flown as Delta Connections and Continental Connections, and booking a flight on the "majors" to a smaller market could easily book you on one of those flights for a shorter leg. It's not like you can just fly majors only to be safer or anything.
- JshWright 13y agoIndeed... In fact, if you asked the passengers of Colgan Air Flight 3407 what airline they were flying, I suspect the vast majority would say 'Continental'
- darkarmani 13y agoAnd the best comment on the article points out that this is even worse than it appears: ========= "I'm sorry, but it's just wrong to say that. Yes, it may have technically been a ComAir flight that crashed in 2006 in Lexington, killing all 50+ people aboard (aside from the first officer), but those people booked a Delta flight, not a ComAir flight, so why make the distinction? And, yes, it may have been a Colgan flight that crashed in Buffalo in 2009, also killing 50 people, but they booked their flight on Continental. Major airlines ferret out their regional connections to these airlines all the time, and you don't know you're on one unless the flight attendant announces it (or you just happen to know about aviation), so why on Earth is this guy making a distinction? I'm a fairly frequent flyer on USAir (enough for mid-level status) and I can't tell you how often I book a USAir flight but I'm actually flying Republic or Chautauqua. Yes, air travel is safe, but let's not ignore reality just to make a (false) point. There have been recent and very deadly crashes since 2001."
- rogerchucker 13y agoYeah, let's give the benefit of doubt to the pilots and only scold the passengers. Typical apologist bullshit.
- rogerchucker 13y agoI wish the coward downvoters would actually point out why I'm wrong with my summarization of this article.
- pavedwalden 13y agoWell, I haven't earned my downvote wings yet, but I'd wager you did yourself in with "typical apologist bullshit". They're not silencing your opinion, they're disapproving of your tone.
- ternaryoperator 13y agoIt's not cowardly to downvote your comment without providing you an explanation.
- stcredzero 13y agoThe distinction between regional carriers and the majors made in the article stinks. If one chooses lowest cost flights, it's impossible to not end up on a regional carrier on one leg of your flight.
- neurotech1 13y agoI have to say I think the conclusion that this isn't related to the Korean Airlines mishap series is mistaken. KAL Cargo Flight 8509 [1] was the last KAL crash, when cultural reasons turned a instrument malfunction into a fatal crash, because a junior FO wouldn't speak up when a Senior Captain(Colonel RoKAF) over-banked the 747, and crashed. One thing that surprises me is that the same personality trait that crashed 8509, would make them a lousy flight lead as well, not to mention a lousy Squadron CO or Wing CO. If the pilots in the squadron aren't comfortable raising safety issues with their CO, then sooner or later, a crash will happen. It's not just a foreign issue, poor safety culture lead to the VFMAT-101 crash in San Diego, where 4 people on the ground died[2]. The CO of VR-1 (Fleet Logistics Squadron/VIP transport) got canned for poor command climate [3], which caused a few safety issues, then fudging her NATOPS flight proficiency paperwork. A more "balanced" CO would have realized that flying the checkride, staying fully current would have been easier, and certainly better for safety climate. IMO(Former pilot): Based on reports, the Pilot Not Flying(PNF/Experienced FO) didn't inform the veteran Captain that he was significantly slow by 500 ft, which could be considered the "waveoff window"[3] for landing a 777 on a runway, even when on a visual approach. Others have pointed out the regulations requiring a go-around for a visual approach are vaguely worded as "when required" without specifying the conditions. Some pilots take that the regulations literally, and believe that a visual approach doesn't require a decision altitude, call-outs or a stabilized approach. It does require to pilots to be safe, and is often required by company Operations Manuals. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash [3] http://www.navytimes.com/article/20120916/NEWS/209160317/UAV-s-longer-wave-off-window-could-pose-threat http://www.navytimes.com/article/20120916/NEWS/209160317/UAV...
- bedhead 13y agoTo some extent these chain of command cultural issues (or whatever you want to call them) are unavoidable and show up in most airlines. The worst aviation disaster in history could largely be chalked up to this problem. Two 747's collided in Tenerife because the co-pilot of one was too timid to tell his pilot, who was practically famous within the company, that he was wrong and should wait to take off.
- rz2k 13y agoPerhaps the most favorable indication of the culture of commercial air flight is that the attitude exhibited by this author has been exceedingly rare. First of all I haven't read or seen any speculation that wasn't qualified as being mere speculation. Second, this is the first instance of reading someone minimizing the accident because of the excellent safety record. Is it too obvious to say that the safety record comes from not minimizing accidents as flukes? The rigorous/tedious checklists, innovations like removing oxygen from near empty fuel tanks so they're less likely to explode, and flight attendant training for quick exits come from experience and the enormous amounts of attention directed at every past failure. Such advances come from a combination of the expertise of people with domain knowledge and people outside of the domain having high standards. In 1985, described as an example of a terrible year for air travel, one still could have put the safety record in perspective with other hazards. Surely it was far more dangerous to travel by car. It is easy to imagine pilots and engineers of 1985 wishing that outsiders who knew less than them would just shut up and let them do their jobs without unnecessary distractions. It's even easy to imagine arguments about the meddling not only being costly, but even a dangerous distraction. Some hysteria, and definitely a lot of lawsuits, aided in the prioritization of problems for people who had the expertise to come up with solutions to minimize fatalities in the future. Outside, unwelcome pressure also disrupts the status quo which, by definition, is part of every failure. I imagine anyone who has domain specific expertise has at least at some time been incredibly annoyed to have to deal with and attempt to manage the reactions of nonexperts while they're in the midst of solving a problem immediately at hand. And yet, such a reaction is cowardly, and enormously unproductive in the long term. I'm not sure if I am beating a dead horse over an obvious point, or not making the point very well at all, but I think it is really important to avoid the pitfalls of only talking to experts, or peers, or people within your established hierarchy of influence when attempting to address failures. This article, made me recall students of nuclear physics on Reddit talking about Fukishima, who couldn't decide whether it was irrelevant because it was an older reactor design, or whether it was irrelevant because it occurred after an earthquake and tsunami that were more severe than the models forecast as possible, or whether nuclear disasters in general are irrelevant because their understanding of worst case was the not-that-bad-all-things-considered case of what was only achieved through heroics of people at Chernobyl. What made the point for me personally was reading about failures at NASA. I highly recommend the long "Columbia's Last Flight" by William Langewiesche in The Atlantic[1] as it had a great influence on me when it came out in 2003, and helped me learn to value input from people without specialty knowledge. Even when special expertise defines who is most likely to develop fixes, the big picture view sometimes only afforded to outsiders is important, or sometimes just enough disruption so different voices within the system are heard. In the case of NASA, things were humming along for the entire edifice because it had worked before when they squelched concerns by small groups within the enormous operation. As a result, when it failed, it was the system itself that failed, and it would have been reckless to trust that system to determine what went wrong. Perhaps even more famously, with Challenger, Richard Feynman was the gadfly in that investigation, and later had plenty to say about the ability of entire cultures to encourage mistakes specifically as a result of their desire to build in-group consensus. So, I think the air travel industry deserves an enormous amount of respect for its excellent safety record, and that the shortage of voices trying minimize this failure suggests that they will accurately determine what went wrong. The value of this column is as an example to the rest of us, not in the air flight industry, of what not to do, and what attitudes stand in the way of improvement and finding solutions. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbias-last-flight/304204/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbia...
- zaroth 13y agoJust like Patrick Smith thinks it's rash to indite the pilots of Flight 214 before we have all the data, I'd ask Pat to do the same for the victims, ahem, passengers. I don't think the emergency exit was some walk down the isle where a few people stopped to reach under their seats and grab their carry-on to save the inconvenience. From the pictures I saw of the cabin, the seats were torn loose, piled up on top of each other, and there was no 'center isle' left. However, it does seem that the condition of the cabin after the plane came to rest was highly variable depending on where you were sitting. For all we know, passengers that were seen carrying bags outside the aircraft could have had to throw those bags down the chute to clear the egress. Or maybe they were in a state of panic and shock and were running on autopilot (if only the plane had landed that way). I do think Patrick is on to something, that the increased level of automation makes it more likely that when the automation isn't there to help that accidents will happen. What I still don't get is flying 30 knots too slow on approach should have been ringing alarms all over the place, including in the tower, and yet no one noticed?
- Shank 13y agoI agree - I think a little more than the instrument landing system was offline during that period of time. Surely ATC had them on radar and could have easily seen them coming in way too slow to properly land.
- cpncrunch 13y agoThat's not ATC's job. A pilot should be able to land the plane himself/herself in visual conditions.
- mikeash 13y agoI'd be rather surprised if the radar could be useful in this capacity. You'd have to build a large database of all aircraft approach speeds, taking into account all the various factors (different weights and configurations) that could change. You'd also have to take into account wind speed and direction, since radar will measure ground speed, but airspeed is what matters. And not just wind, but wind at their precise altitude, which your ground weather station is not measuring. (Wind speed and direction can vary enormously over altitude, especially close to the ground, due to friction.) Finally, you'd have to catch it and communicate it in time to do something useful, which seems tough in this case, since the airspeed didn't get low until fairly shortly before the crash. I wonder if a simple and effective thing to do here would be to simply display a velocity vector, either in a HUD on the windscreen itself, or on some kind of video display in the cockpit. Just a symbol on the screen that shows exactly which way the airplane is headed at any given moment. When it's on a runway, that's where you'll touch down if nothing changes. When it's on a seawall before the runway, that's where you're going to crash unless you fix things. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to construct one based on GPS and a forward-looking camera. Edit: thinking more about that last suggestion, more recurrent training for visual approaches would probably be a better idea. A normal human has a built-in velocity vector already. You look out the window and find the point on the ground that isn't moving relative to your view. That's the point you're headed toward. This is Aviation 101 stuff, literally one of the first things a pilot ever learns about landing an airplane. High and low comes later: the first thing you pay attention to is whether that non-moving point is, in fact, on the runway where you intend to touch down. (Or, because of the flare, slightly before where you intend to touch down.)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jordanthoms 13y agoI'm finding it a little annoying how people seem to like to defend every aspect of the flight - the pilots were fine, the plane was fine, the runway is fine (two of those I believe, BTW), as if that makes it better. The plane crashed and two people died, something was _definitely_ wrong.
- Aloisius 13y agoCan someone explain to me why humans land these planes? These airports are fixed. We can easily set up transmitters around them to allow the plane to triangulate its position to less than an inch. Even excluding the tragedy of the loss of human life, you would think the lost of a multi-billion dollar airplane even once every decade would push people to automate the most dangerous part of flying (landing) to machines.
- snom380 13y agoBecause machines aren't perfect either. Airports already have those transmitters and can autoland, but pilots always have to be ready to take over, and sometimes have to. There are just too many things that can go wrong technically to not have trained, proficient pilots in the cockpit.
- Aloisius 13y agoI didn't argue not having pilots in the cockpit. I'm arguing against pilots being in manual control of the plane when landing when the plane is capable of landing itself. If it isn't, fine, have a pilot take over, but that shouldn't be the case 99% of the time.
- will_asouka 13y agoIf pilots only hand flew 1% of landings, they wouldn't be sufficiently practised to do a good job. The simulator just can't recreate real world conditions accurately enough to be relied on totally. Hence, pilots must fly a certain number of manual and auto landings in a quarter to stay legal.
- snom380 13y agoExactly. A contributing cause of AF447 was a lack of high altitude flying experience and training on emergencies there, since the training regime is traditionally focused on the more accident-prone takeoff and landing phases.
- 13y ago
- cpncrunch 13y agoWhatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly suspect that it was in fact related to the culture of Korean air safety in 2013: http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-crash-san-francisco-63.html#post7931852 http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-cras...