Accident: Asiana B772 at San Francisco on Jul 6th 2013

[Lock SH 0]

Company (airlines) reputation is one of the criteria before I make a decision to purchase a ticket. Sometimes, cheap does not mean safe and a reputable airlines does not come cheap anyway ..........

 

Just a thought ......

 

 

[S V Choong 4]

Company (airlines) reputation is one of the criteria before I make a decision to purchase a ticket. Sometimes, cheap does not mean safe and a reputable airlines does not come cheap anyway ..........

 

Just a thought ......

 

Yep, simple economics I guess! The same applies to other stuff such as consumer electronics.

[Cire 0]

In other words, reputable airlines have a more steady and experienced pilots than those newer and less known ones, which could only afford to recruit fresh pilots with lesser air time in type.

I guess there is some true to this beliefs.

[leon t 0]

think its not "cheap" means not safe - as even the most reputable have crashes in recent years - eg Air France had a A340 crashed and finally burnt when the pilots landed in heavy rain and another of their A330 disintegrated in flight over turbulence in which investigators pointed to the pilots for lack of awareness and wrong decisions madein operating the aircraft.

Even in this instance, theAsiana pilots are experienced and are not "those newer and less known ones, which could only afford to recruit fresh pilots with lesser air time in type."

Even looking at Air Asia, they have very good experienced pilots and some are from known reputable airlines. Its more somehow for some unexpalined reasons that experienced pilots may somehow do things wrongly at that time.

[alberttky 0]

Korean Pilots Avoided Manual Flying, Former Trainers Say

As the Asiana Airlines Inc. (020560) jet neared Los Angeles International Airport, Captain Vic Hooper told his Korean co-pilot to make a visual approach, meaning he’d manually fly instead of letting automation do the work.

The co-pilot froze, leaving them too high and off course, Hooper said about the incident, which occurred several years ago. Hooper said he had to take over the controls to get the Boeing Co. (BA) 777 back on track.

“I don’t need to know this,” Hooper said the co-pilot told him later, explaining why a maneuver that’s second nature to most U.S. airline pilots rattled him. “We just don’t do this.”

U.S. crash investigators are examining the manual flying skills and cockpit teamwork among the pilots of Asiana Flight 214 as they determine why the 777 crashed in San Francisco on July 6, killing three teenaged girls from China. Two passengers remain in critical condition at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, according to a statement yesterday.

Pilots were being told by air-traffic controllers to use visual approaches the day of the accident because the airport’s glide slope, which helps line up the correct path to the runway, was closed for construction, U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman said last week.

Too Low

The plane was coming in too low and had gotten almost 40 miles an hour slower than the target approach speed when its landing gear and tail struck a seawall short of the runway, Hersman said.

Lee Hyo Min, a spokeswoman at Asiana, declined to discuss the manual flying skills of its pilots, citing the NTSB investigation.

Asiana (020560) shares fell 0.6 percent to 4,810 won, the lowest since April 2010, at the close of Seoul trading. The stock has slumped 22 percent this year, compared with a 6.5 percent decline in South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index.Korean Air Lines Co. (003490) rose 0.2 percent today.

“As planes become more sophisticated, the government has told airlines that they need to narrow the gap between digital and analogue systems,” Kwon Yong Bok, director general of aviation safety policy at the South Korean transport ministry, said in an interview today when asked about pilots’ dependence on automation. He didn’t elaborate.

 

Asiana Pilots

Three aviators who flew for Asiana or who helped train crews in Korea said in interviews that the Asiana pilots they flew with, while intelligent and well trained on automated systems, rarely flew manually.

Hooper is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a former Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL) captain with more than 25,000 hours in the cockpit.

Ross Aimer, a retired United Airlines captain who trained crews at Korean Air Lines (003490)for Boeing subsidiary Alteon Training in 2008 and 2009, and Kenneth Musser, of Roswell, Georgia, said they also noticed that many Korean pilots struggled with visual approaches. Musser, a former Delta pilot, flew777s for Asiana for almost four years until 2009.

“You will never hear an Asiana pilot request a visual approach,” said Hooper, who flew for the Korean carrier from 2006 to 2011 after ending his U.S. airline career. “That happens all the time here” in the U.S.

Touch, Gos

Visual landing is one of the first skills an aviator in the U.S. learns, as a civilian practicing on single-engine planes with an instructor at a small airport or as a military student pilot.

In both cases, pilots make dozens or hundreds of unassisted landings before graduating to more sophisticated aircraft, Aimer said.

Civilians in Korea rarely learn to become pilots because the country doesn’t have the same network of public airports, Aimer said. Most non-military pilots hired by Asiana are sent to flight school by the carrier, he said.

Among Korean pilots, even those who flew in the military, comfort with manual flying was unusual, he said.

“They know their procedures almost better than we did as instructors,” said Aimer, who now works at Los Angeles-based Aero Consulting Experts. “But we all noticed they all had more trouble with a simple visual approach than with a very sophisticated approach.”

Improving Record

David Greenberg, a retired Delta executive, was hired by Korean Air in 2000 to bolster its safety and pilot training following three fatal crashes from 1997 through 1999.

“I observed it,” Greenberg, speaking in an interview, said of Korean pilots’ deficiencies in hand-flying planes, while adding it wasn’t worse than with pilots elsewhere in the world.

A Korean Air Boeing 747 struck a hilltop in Guam on Aug. 6, 1997, killing 228 of the 254 people aboard. The NTSB said the co-pilot and flight engineer failed to monitor the captain, who had gotten too low, and found Korean Air’s training “inadequate.”

Korean Air has had a “stellar” safety record since its last fatal accident in 1999, Penny Pfaelzer, the company’s Phoenix-based spokeswoman, said in an interview. The company brought in outside pilots and managers and revamped its safety and training, Pfaelzer said.

“They’ve established training that is the gold standard in Asia,” she said.

Eroding Skills

There were no fatal accidents involving Korea’s two main carriers after 1999 until a 2011 Asiana cargo plane caught fire while in flight and crashed, according to AviationSafetyNetwork, a Web-based database of crashes.

Delta experienced a similar shortfall in pilot skills in the 1980s after introducing more automated Boeing 757s and 767s to its fleet, Greenberg said.

Flying skills have eroded globally in an era of heavily automated jets, said Robert Mann, a former airline executive who runs consultant R.W. Mann & Co. in Port Washington, New York.

International flight crews, who may make only four trips a month and spend most of that time on autopilot, “probably don’t get enough hand-flying,” Mann said.

While the accident involved different circumstances, the Air France (AF) pilots who crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing 228 people, had difficulty flying the plane by hand after a malfunction switched off the Airbus SAS A330’s automation, according to France’s Bureau of Investigations and Analysis. Three Seconds

After noticing their plane had slowed to well below the target landing speed, the Asiana Flight 214 pilots didn’t attempt to abort their landing in San Francisco until less than 3 seconds before it struck the seawall, Hersman said.

While the pilot at the controls had almost 10,000 hours of flight experience, he had flown only 10 legs and 35 hours in the wide-body 777. A management captain making his first flight as an instructor was supervising from the co-pilot’s seat. Another pilot aboard to give the primary pilots a rest break was seated in the rear of the cockpit.

From the time that the plane descended through 500 feet, the point at which Boeing advises pilots to abort if they aren’t sure the landing is set up properly, none of the crew voiced concerns until the final seconds before the crash, according to Hersman.

The Korean government has announced it will investigate whether the crew followed procedures and how they were trained, according to a Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport statement.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-16/korean-pilots-avoided-manual-flying-former-trainers-say.html
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How often do MH and AK/D7 and now OD pilots perform visual approaches??? Are they too reliant on automations too? Captain your comments please.

Edited July 16, 2013 by alberttky

[Radzi 2]

 

How often do MH and AK/D7 and now OD pilots perform visual approaches??? Are they too reliant on automations too? Captain your comments please.

 

Not much, actually, since there are not too many places where visual approach is an option. Definitely not at busy international airports where radar vectoring is the norm. Even when there are places without ILS (such as BKI) the FMC of the newer aircraft can be programmed to follow an ILS-like profile.

 

While I've never flown a B777, I'm quite sure the glide path profile can be programmed too, so you'll have vertical guidance on the PFD all the time during approach. Pure visual approach really is not required anymore.

[Lock SH 0]

Visual approach is quite norm to many major airports such as JFK (Canarsie approach rwy 13L), SYD rwy 34L, BNE, FUK rwy 34 even at night, KIX, SFO (both day & night), ORD ......... just to name a few.

 

Visual approach does not translate to a manual flying except the last few miles before touch down. Flight Directors and Auto Throttle/Thrust should be used all the time. One could still perform a visual approach just like a circuit (e.g. FUK and ORD) with full automation until established on final at less than 1000 feet AAL before disconnesting the autopilot. Likewise, a radar vector for 8 nm miles final for a visual approach (e.g. SYD) should be done by using autopilot to give min handling error, maximising the accuraccy and maintaining restrictions imposed by ATC such as altitude, speed and heading. It also gives more brain capacity for PF to perform his job and PM to monitor the PF's flying.

 

Whether or not major airlines practice visual approaches very much dependent on how much sim training allocated to each and every individual pilot to develop the skill and confident level. However, each and every line pilot should possess this basic skills and be able to perform a visual approach safely, albeit with the help of autopilots and ground aids.

 

Both Boeing FMCs and Airbus FMGECs could be programmed manually for a basic profile distance to touch down vs altitude & speed constraint. However, this manually programmed profile should be treated as a guide but not to be followed blindly.

 

 

[S V Choong 4]

Not much, actually, since there are not too many places where visual approach is an option. Definitely not at busy international airports where radar vectoring is the norm. Even when there are places without ILS (such as BKI) the FMC of the newer aircraft can be programmed to follow an ILS-like profile.

 

While I've never flown a B777, I'm quite sure the glide path profile can be programmed too, so you'll have vertical guidance on the PFD all the time during approach. Pure visual approach really is not required anymore.

 

Captain, is ILS available to smaller airports in Eastern states such as TWU, SDK, LDU, LBU, Miri and SIbu? What is the reason for BKI not having ILS, was it due to the long overdue runway extension?

[Radzi 2]

Captain, is ILS available to smaller airports in Eastern states such as TWU, SDK, LDU, LBU, Miri and SIbu? What is the reason for BKI not having ILS, was it due to the long overdue runway extension?

 

ILS is available for all airports in Malaysia that have passenger jet services, the only exception is BKI where the ILS is withdrawn due to the expansion work. Which means it will be available again probably in 2039.

[Mushrif A 3]

ILS is available for all airports in Malaysia that have passenger jet services, the only exception is BKI where the ILS is withdrawn due to the expansion work. Which means it will be available again probably in 2039.

...or slightly earlier, if there is an accident or incident and lack of ILS is cited as one of the main reasons the accident/ incident happened...(as always in M'sia, somebody has to die/ get hurt before any urgency is shown...)

[alberttky 0]

...or slightly earlier, if there is an accident or incident and lack of ILS is cited as one of the main reasons the accident/ incident happened...(as always in M'sia, somebody has to die/ get hurt before any urgency is shown...)

Or maybe it depends on who's in the accident. If the accident involves someone / company linked to someone up there, then yes, urgency will be immediate. If not, they'll just blame the pilots.

[Cire 0]

Its a matter of severly wrong timing to execute a visual approach command on a Korean pilot whose fraternity does not usually practices such method to land a plane.

So here we a combination of rookies no. 1, the Korean pilot is not fully acquainted yet with the 777 and what's more with the unfamiliar visual approach method, and rookie no.2, the instructor pilot who did not expect the longer reaction time on his command for a visual approach execution.

 

 

Will the CVR be released to the public?

[alberttky 0]

Will the CVR be released to the public?

It is normally included as an appendix / attachment of the final report.

[Aaron Goh 1]

777 can be programmed to fly a visual but not autoland. However, to know how to program it is another matter. So is it really lack of manual flying skills or lack of understanding of automation? Anyway, when an ang moh screw up its due weather etc, when yellow man screw up its due lack of skill.

[Isaac 0]

Asiana Airlines Flight 214 passenger Ye Mengyan died of injuries she received from being run over by a fire department vehicle, and she was alive when she was hit, authorities said.

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/19/travel/asiana-airlines-crash/

[Mike P 0]

So in that case, whose insurance going to pay for the death of those poor girls? SFO airport? SFO Fire Department? or Asiana?

[Isaac 0]

So in that case, whose insurance going to pay for the death of those poor girls? SFO airport? SFO Fire Department? or Asiana?

Speaking of compensation, CNN reported that the survivors will each get USD1 Million. Those who were severely injured but survived will get a bit more.

Edited July 20, 2013 by Isaac

[Mike P 0]

Speaking of compensation, CNN reported that the survivors will each get USD1 Million. Those who were severely injured but survived will get a bit more.

 

I think those are from Asiana.

[zamim 0]

 

 

Asiana Crash Victim May Have Been Hit By Two Vehicles

 

A teenager who was thrown to the runway in the Asiana Airways plane crash earlier this month was killed when she was run over by at least one and maybe two rescue vehicles racing to the crash, officials said [yesterday].

The cause of death for Ye Mengyuan, 16, was multiple blunt trauma "consistent with being run over by a motor vehicle," San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said in a news conference today. A forensic examination revealed that she was alive at the time when she was hit, he said.

San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said she believes it was a specialized rig that came from the airport that fatally struck Mengyuan.

"My understanding is that she was not standing up. She was on the ground when our rigs, one rig or possibly two, made contact with her," Hayes-White said.

So in that case, whose insurance going to pay for the death of those poor girls? SFO airport? SFO Fire Department? or Asiana?

[alberttky 0]

I think it'll still have to be from Asiana, ultimately they're still the root cause of the problem.

[Cire 0]

The compensation or whatever we called it, is blood money in my opinion. People have died in the most horific ways imaginable here. (so unfortunate to have ran over by one or possibly two specialised equipments) Those machines are huge. Perhaps they will be a revamp on the operating procedures for airport fire fighters around the world since this incident. Can't see well, take cautions. There may be survival infront of you.

[Waiping 12]

Makes me wonder where should passengers run towards in a plane crash. Based on photos of the location of the accident it didn't appear that she has runaway far enough from the burning aircraft.

[flee 5]

Makes me wonder where should passengers run towards in a plane crash. Based on photos of the location of the accident it didn't appear that she has runaway far enough from the burning aircraft.

There isn't really a safe place. What I usually try to do when I fly is to wear high visibility clothing. Bright red, orange or yellow should do it...

[alberttky 0]

Wake-up call for cockpits

In an era of ever-increasing automation, the NTSB says pilot culture must change to clarify what it means to operate a modern aircraft during all modes of flight


What specifically caused Asiana Airlines flight 214 to strike a sea wall and crash in San Francisco on 6 July will not be known for weeks or months. But investigators have already identified one salient fact about the incident that is likely to fuel an ongoing drive by regulators and industry groups to make pilots better monitors of automated cockpits.

In the case of flight 214, the right-seat pilot - Lee Jeong-min - told the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in a post-crash interview that he was unaware his Boeing 777-200ER was flying 34kt below reference speed for approach and on the verge of stalling until it was too late. Jeong-min, as the "pilot monitoring", said he had assumed the auto-throttles were engaged, but they were not.

The need to make pilots more effective monitors in the era of automation is already a common discussion among aviation safety experts. NTSB studies dating to the early 1990s document how errors by either confused or oblivious crew members often contribute to or cause fatal accidents, but progress has been slow. Now a US working group launched by the NTSB and other industry stakeholders is working on a new way to improve pilot monitoring skills. The goal is to clarify what it means to monitor a modern cockpit and assign monitoring tasks depending on whether the aircraft is in taxi, ascending and descending, or cruise mode.

The group hopes the recommendations scheduled for release in December will spark broader awareness of the importance of pilot monitoring skills. NTSB member Robert Sumwalt, who has championed this cause for several years, says he believes that pilot culture must change.

 

PHASES OF FLIGHT
Speaking to the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA)'s Air Safety Forum on 17 July, Sumwalt said pilots are still judged mainly on their flying and interpersonal skills, but not on how well they monitor the aircraft's performance in all phases of flight. "I think it's time to have a paradigm shift," Sumwalt says. "Yes, a pilot has to have good stick and rudder skills, and, yes, they have to have good CRM [crew resource management] skills, but they also have to have good monitoring skills."

Part of the challenge of building better monitoring skills is the design of the human brain, which is ill-suited to many of the kinds of tasks necessary to manage an automated cockpit, according to Key Dismukes, a recently retired NASA chief scientist for aerospace human factors.

Dismukes, who also spoke at the ALPA forum, described a NASA study that observed commercial pilots on 60 flights involving Airbus, Boeing and Embraer aircraft. The study discovered that pilots made an average of six monitoring "deviations" per flight.

"Some of these deviations are fairly serious," Dismukes says. "On one occasion the flying pilot was about to advance the throttles, but neither pilot had noticed that an incorrect heading was set in the FMC [flight management computer]."

NASA's researchers recorded 19 instances when there was a failure by both pilots to call out a mode change in the automation system, such as switching to vertical speed mode for making altitude changes.

The study also examined the crew members on approaches that were not stabilised, meaning the aircraft has been hand-flown to land. Of the 60 flights reviewed, nine involved unstabilised approaches. All nine aircraft were required by the 1,000ft (305m) call-out to be in landing configuration and on the glide path.



In each case, the pilot monitoring is expected but not always required to call out altitude marks at 1,000ft and 500ft from landing. On five of the nine unstabilised approaches, however, the pilot monitoring made no such call-out. On the other four, the pilot made the call-out but did not indicate a deviation from the 1,000ft gate even though the aircraft was not in final landing configuration until the 900ft mark, Dismukes says.

"The big question is why do highly experienced, motivated pilots with their lives on the line not always monitor as effectively as we expect them to," he adds. "We need to know why because, I guarantee you, if we simply go back to the training department and tell the instructors to put more emphasis on monitoring, nothing is going to change."

Perhaps the biggest factor NASA identifies is simply how the human brain processes information. The human brain has evolved to most effectively react to stimuli, such as a master caution light appearing or a rapid decompression, Dismukes says. It is less well-equipped to monitor screens and buttons that are generally reliable to detect rare faults or situational anomalies.

"So if you have checked the position of a particular switch or gauge 1,000 times over a course of 1,000 flights and it's always been where it's supposed to be, on that one rare occasion it's not where it's supposed to be you look at it and you see what you expected to see," Dismukes says. "We look at it for a fraction of a second. That's not long enough for the brain to process the information about where the switch is actually set."

 

GENETIC COMPLICATION
That fundamental, genetic complication is compounded by other sources of distraction, such as multi-tasking or rushing pilots, Dismukes says, such as when a first officer who is supposed to be looking for collision threats during taxi instead is head-down entering last-minute data into the FMC.

The NTSB-sponsored working group, which includes ALPA representatives, wants to offer airlines a new template for improving pilot monitoring skills. The group was formed November and has its final meeting in October. The recommendations could be published in December, says Helena Reidemar, ALPA's director of human factors.

Underpinning the working group's project is a sense that pilot monitoring skills are still not emphasised enough, even despite the NTSB re-designating the "pilot not flying" as the "pilot monitoring" in official reports starting in 2003. "With this change in terminology there really wasn't an associated training piece to go with that," she says.

The working group has clarified the term by redesignating it as "actively monitoring". One problem is that cockpit systems are often designed for the pilots to passively monitor the aircraft. "We're not just robots. We can't sit in there and watch and stare at the instruments for hours on end," Reidemar says. "We're not wired like that."

In the absence of a sudden new shift in cockpit design philosophy, however, pilots must adjust the way they interact with the automated systems. That means one or both pilots should be "actively monitoring" by mentally flying the aircraft as if there were no automated systems engaged, she says. "Consider how active your scan is while you're hand-flying," Reidemar says. "Try to incorporate that mindset in other non-hand-flying situations."

Some US airlines are already developing training programmes aimed at improving monitoring skills in similar ways. ALPA's Air Safety Forum featured a presentation by Christopher Reid, manager of the advanced qualification programme at JetBlue Airways.

The carrier recently established a training module that divides a flight into three zones: red, yellow and green. In the green zone, the aircraft is in a stable cruise flight, so one pilot is supposed to be actively monitoring while the other can accomplish non-essential tasks, such as stowing an electronic flightbag or eating lunch. In the yellow zone, as the aircraft approaches a flight level change or a descent, the non-flying pilot is supposed to be fully monitoring but is allowed to complete essential tasks, such as a required radio call-out. In the red zone during final approach and taxi, both pilots must be actively monitoring the cockpit systems. "What we try to convey is that if you're not monitoring the flight instruments exactly like you would if you were hand-flying the airplane, you're not really monitoring the airplane," Reid says.

https://www.flightglobal.com/fg-club/in-focus/pilot-monitoring/

Edited July 25, 2013 by alberttky

[David.W 0]

San Francisco bans helmet cams after they capture firefighters running over Asiana crash victim

By Arturo Garcia

Members of the San Francisco Fire Department have been banned from using helmet cameras during operations after video surfaced showing firefighters running over and killing a victim of the July 2013 Oceana Airlines plane crash.

The Associated Press reported on Monday that video from Battalion Chief Mark Johnson’s helmet camera shows a fire truck running over 16-year-old Ye Meng Yuan, who was lying on the ground following the crash. Johnson had apparently not been told of Yuan’s whereabouts or condition while directing the truck.

The discovery of the footage led Chief Joanne Hayes-White to expand a 2009 order banning cameras on department grounds to include helmet cameras, citing concerns over firefighters’ safety.

“The timing may not look good,” a department spokesperson told KTVU-TV. “But the fact of the matter is, this is the first helmet camera issue that’s occurred since the 2009 policy was created that [Hayes-White] was aware of.”

But Hayes-White’s order was immediately questioned by both the Black Firefighters Association (BFA), of which Johnson is a member, and an attorney for Ye’s family, Anthony Tarricone.

“Why would anybody not want to know the truth?” Tarricone told the AP. “What’s wrong with knowing what happened? What’s wrong with keeping people honest? That’s what the helmet cam did, in effect, in this case.”

Meanwhile, BFA president Kevin Smith told the AP that the department seems to be more concerned with its potential liability than with improving firefighters’ efficiency, arguing that helmet cameras help improve communications between firefighters and their commanders.

“The department should develop a progressive policy to use this tool in a way that is beneficial and not simply restrict its use,” Smith told the AP. “We are public servants, we serve the public. Why be secretive?”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/20/san-francisco-bans-helmet-cams-after-they-capture-firefighters-running-over-asiana-crash-victim/