SFO crash

[tombogan03884]

Has any one else been following the coverage of the Asiana Airways crash at San Francisco .
I watched from 5 till 7 PM Eastern time on Fox.
It was 2 hours of officials telling reporters "It's to early to say", "that information is not yet available" and the talking heads parading their breath taking ignorance in general, and total lack of knowledge about either SF weather, or airplanes in particular.
I learned far more simply by looking at the video, some of which completely contradicted what the news reader was saying .
I particularly enjoyed the lady from NTSB battling her hair and still managing to tell a reporter, "We are in Washington, when we get to San Francisco we may have more information .

Another good laugh came from the Fox commercial saying "All eyes are on Egypt".
Not if you were watching Fox .
Judging by them the entire rest of the world stopped for this plane crash with NO confirmed deaths as of 7 hours after it happened.
Fox is not that good.
They just suck a little less than the rest.

[Solus]

Last I heard there were 2 deaths and a score or so of injured....from the looks of the plane, I'd have guessed it would be very much worse.

A credit to the crew in both landing the plane and evacuating it prior to the what looks like a major fire which gutted the plane.

I can hear the heads of MSM news depts. all over bitching that they wasted 7+ hours of coverage for a measly 2 deaths.

[tombogan03884]

The video showed an impact mark on the retaining wall, a narrow drag mark with pieces of the tail and landing gearand then the slide marks in the dirt.
It's pretty simple for any one with even half a brain to follow the trail the plane took.
The only real mystery is why it was 100 or so feet low on approach, and it sure as hell was not the weather, it's exactly the same for about 9 months of the year .
The rule of thumb is keep flying it till it stops moving, but once the tail hit the pilots were meaningless it was all up to inertia, friction, and physics.
The fire did not break out for a few minutes.
There were pictures of evacuated passengers milling around the pre-fire wreck JNevis could say for sure, but I bet hydraulic lines or some such run over head and were ignited by the friction and sparks of the slide .
The wings, where the fuel tanks are located are more or less whole and show no fire damage, so the fire was confined to one the fuselage roof.

[Frosty]

As a former aircraft mech., 90% of ALL crashes are due to pilot error. With that being said, there are numerous factors that fall into place. I'll wait for the NTSB report because they reconstruct the complete incident prior to leading up to the crash. They will use the infamous "Black Box", pilot transmissions, Tower transmissions, A/C maintenance records ( hopefully the last mech. documented everything). It's a very detailed investigation & they will totally reconstruct the plane after the crash, which in itself is really amazing. Back in 2008 a plane crashed in Denver during takeoff, the NTSP reconstructed it and reviewed all recordings. After it was all said & done it came down to pilot error. The pilot was hit with a strong cross wind & failed to correct properly using the tail rudder. Hence - pilot error.

[tombogan03884]

This morning some of the radio traffic between the Tower and the plane was on the news .
One of the last statements was, "We have an emergency".

[Sponsor]

[billt]

Too low on the approach, too late firewalling the thrust levers for a go around. A bit like this, but not as spectacular.

Start at 1:50

[mortdooley]

 A few years ago I had a window seat on a Southwest Airline flight into SFA and we must have used the same runway. The approach was long and low and I could see the faces of boaters in the bay as we passed over them. I'm just surprised it never happened before.

[billt]

They, (NTSB), announced they were almost 40 knots TOO SLOW when they crossed the threshold. That in itself is an unbelievable mistake. Neither of those slope heads had any business in that cockpit.

[Tyler Durden]

I was a human factors engineering major at the Air Force Academy.  What we dealt with back then as undergrads was trying to eliminate or reduce the human factor in aircraft crashes.  I think you all can see why that would be relevant for the Air Force to have personnel educated in such things.  At the time, we just operated under the ASSumption that 50 to 70% of all aircraft crashes were pilot error.

The first thing that popped into my head when I saw an aerial view of the airport was the approach over the ocean.  On a calm day, with no white caps, the ocean is a featureless terrain.  It gives you no peripheral vision clues of the ground rush.  So you can't judge your speed.  Ground rush is important because I am sure ya'll have experienced this before, say like driving in a Corvette or some other sports car, and then later driving in a pick up truck.  Even though the speedometer reads the same  between the vehicles, the Vette just gives the sensation of being faster...or the truck feels so much slower.

What keys into that is that their ILS (glide scope) for that runway approach was down. 

The middle one indicates that the plane's glidescope is good:



I am not sure what the height difference is in the cockpits of the 747 and the 777 are.  Back when the 747's first came out, they were so tall that the pilots didn't get the same ground rush when taxiing.  So pilots were taxiing too fast.  I think Boeing retrofited them with some sort of stick shaker or pedal shaker mechanism or maybe some audible warning to tell the pilots they were taxiing too fast.

They say that the pilot of this Asiana flight had like a gazillion hours in the 747.  If the height difference is substantial, the pilot could have thought he was going too fast in the 777 and reduced power, erroneously.

Whatever his peripheral vision/ground rush and just plain seat of the pants feeling told him could have been cross checked with the glidescope, if it had been operational.

As far as the media response, if it bleeds, it leads.

[billt]

The airspeed indicator is your friend when you're on final.