Patrick Smith
By Patrick Smith
On Saturday afternoon an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport, killing at least two passengers and injuring dozens more, many of them seriously. I’ve been an airline pilot since 1990, and I’d like to offer some perspective on this still-developing story. But before getting to the accident itself, I’d like to express my dismay over the media’s shamelessly sensationalistic coverage of it. A certain degree of network hyperventilation always follows air crashes, but this time, from the absurd eyewitness accounts to the at times wildly inaccurate commentary of various aviation “experts,” they’ve taken things to a new level of inanity and poor taste.
One thing sorely missing from the coverage thus far has been a sense of perspective. I don’t mean to diminish the seriousness of what happened. It’s a tragedy when anybody is killed in a plane crash. However, the vast majority of the passengers on Asiana Flight 214 made it off the plane alive. This simply was not an air disaster of the scale that was once relatively common and is not deserving of terms like “catastrophe.”
It is imperative to remember that Saturday’s accident was the first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America since November 2001.
Reportedly, Flight 214’s captain was new to the aircraft, and had accrued fewer than 50 total hours in the 777 prior to the accident. While much is being made of this, to me it’s a red herring. Pilots transition from aircraft type to aircraft type all the time, and it’s not uncommon for a pilot to have a limited number of hours in whichever plane he or she has most recently qualified in.
What’s more, there is always a minimum of two pilots in the cockpit, a captain and a first officer — the latter is referred to colloquially as the “co-pilot.” Both are fully qualified to operate the aircraft, and they share flying duties; first officers perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do. It’s not yet clear which Asiana pilot was physically at the controls, the captain or first officer. In any case, either pilot would have been in a position to note and correct for deviations, or to execute a go-around manoeuvre. Why this didn’t happen we don’t know.
All pilots are trained to handle the sorts of challenges SFO presents, and visual approaches, which do not rely on instrument guidance to the extent of the more common ILS approach, are common at large and busy airports. The lack of instrument guidance, together with SFO’s high-workload environment, may have been a contributing factor, but this alone does not excuse or explain landing short of a runway.
Already I’m speculating more than I intended to. Whether this was human error, mechanical failure, or some combination of the two remains to be determined. In the meantime, I would caution readers to be leery of what you hear from TV or the press.
Lastly, we’re hearing murmurs already about the fact that Asiana Airlines hails from South Korea, a country with a checkered past when it comes to air safety. Let’s nip this storyline in the bud. In the 1980s and 1990s, that country’s largest carrier, Korean Air, suffered a spate of fatal accidents, culminating with the crash of Flight 801 in Guam in 1997. The airline was faulted for poor training standards and a rigid, authoritarian cockpit culture.
But South Korean aviation is very different today, following a systemic and very expensive overhaul of the nation’s civil aviation system.
Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly doubt that it was anything related to the culture of South Korean air safety in 2013. Plane crashes are increasingly rare the world over. But they will continue to happen from time to time, and no airline or country is 100 percent immune. WP-BLOOMBERG
By Patrick Smith
On Saturday afternoon an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport, killing at least two passengers and injuring dozens more, many of them seriously. I’ve been an airline pilot since 1990, and I’d like to offer some perspective on this still-developing story. But before getting to the accident itself, I’d like to express my dismay over the media’s shamelessly sensationalistic coverage of it. A certain degree of network hyperventilation always follows air crashes, but this time, from the absurd eyewitness accounts to the at times wildly inaccurate commentary of various aviation “experts,” they’ve taken things to a new level of inanity and poor taste.
One thing sorely missing from the coverage thus far has been a sense of perspective. I don’t mean to diminish the seriousness of what happened. It’s a tragedy when anybody is killed in a plane crash. However, the vast majority of the passengers on Asiana Flight 214 made it off the plane alive. This simply was not an air disaster of the scale that was once relatively common and is not deserving of terms like “catastrophe.”
It is imperative to remember that Saturday’s accident was the first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America since November 2001.
Reportedly, Flight 214’s captain was new to the aircraft, and had accrued fewer than 50 total hours in the 777 prior to the accident. While much is being made of this, to me it’s a red herring. Pilots transition from aircraft type to aircraft type all the time, and it’s not uncommon for a pilot to have a limited number of hours in whichever plane he or she has most recently qualified in.
What’s more, there is always a minimum of two pilots in the cockpit, a captain and a first officer — the latter is referred to colloquially as the “co-pilot.” Both are fully qualified to operate the aircraft, and they share flying duties; first officers perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do. It’s not yet clear which Asiana pilot was physically at the controls, the captain or first officer. In any case, either pilot would have been in a position to note and correct for deviations, or to execute a go-around manoeuvre. Why this didn’t happen we don’t know.
All pilots are trained to handle the sorts of challenges SFO presents, and visual approaches, which do not rely on instrument guidance to the extent of the more common ILS approach, are common at large and busy airports. The lack of instrument guidance, together with SFO’s high-workload environment, may have been a contributing factor, but this alone does not excuse or explain landing short of a runway.
Already I’m speculating more than I intended to. Whether this was human error, mechanical failure, or some combination of the two remains to be determined. In the meantime, I would caution readers to be leery of what you hear from TV or the press.
Lastly, we’re hearing murmurs already about the fact that Asiana Airlines hails from South Korea, a country with a checkered past when it comes to air safety. Let’s nip this storyline in the bud. In the 1980s and 1990s, that country’s largest carrier, Korean Air, suffered a spate of fatal accidents, culminating with the crash of Flight 801 in Guam in 1997. The airline was faulted for poor training standards and a rigid, authoritarian cockpit culture.
But South Korean aviation is very different today, following a systemic and very expensive overhaul of the nation’s civil aviation system.
Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly doubt that it was anything related to the culture of South Korean air safety in 2013. Plane crashes are increasingly rare the world over. But they will continue to happen from time to time, and no airline or country is 100 percent immune. WP-BLOOMBERG
