Boeing 777 Crash Lands in San Francisco

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In summary, the tragic plane crash in San Francisco has left two people dead and dozens of passengers unaccounted for. Officials are investigating the cause of the crash, which is believed to have been due to the plane's faulty approach.
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  • #4
One picture that says "the beginning of the debris" shows debris on the rocks at the water's edge, did the plane first hit the rocks? It looks that way. (picture #11 in lisab's link)
 
  • #5
Evo said:
One picture that says "the beginning of the debris" shows debris on the rocks at the water's edge, did the plane first hit the rocks? It looks that way. (picture #11 in lisab's link)

It's possible. One eyewitness's observation:

Stefanie Turner was walking to her hotel on the waterfront across from the runway at San Francisco International Airport when she saw a landing plane coming in at a bad angle, its tail very low.

"As we were watching, we saw the Asiana flight approaching, and we saw that the angle was wrong," she said. "The tail was too low as it was approaching.”

"The tail kind of clipped the runway. I think that’s when the tail broke off,” Turner said.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/06/19324552-pillars-of-smoke-several-flips-witnesses-recount-scene-at-san-francisco-plane-crash?lite

The San Francisco airport is right on the water - I mean, the distance between the bay and the end of the runway is just feet! I once landed there and was sure we were going into the water, but the runway appeared seconds before "impact" :eek:.

In a plane having trouble, it's very lucky the pilot made it to dry land!
 
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  • #7
lisab said:
Officials say two are confirmed dead, and "upwards of 60" passengers are still unaccounted for. Yikes, that's a lot!

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/06/us/california-plane-incident/index.html?hpt=hp_t1


Oh dear. Yes, I was hesitant to think first reporting that everyone had been accounted for would not be correct, especially considering seeing pictures of the aftermath of the event.
 
  • #8
Yes, the plane first hit the breakwater which tore off an engine and tail ( as reported on TV news/Fox)
A few years ago I decided to never fly a Korean airline again. This was Korean Air landing in Seoul and the plane was landing so steep and fast that its axis was skidding +200 -200.on the runway.
And eye witness reports of the Asiana plane crash in S.F. have said the plane was coming
in extremely fast and steep.
 
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  • #9
http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_07_06_2013_p0-594353.xml

Weather at the time of the accident was good with light winds of 6 to 7 knots from the southwest and visibility of 10 nautical miles or more. Investigators will focus on several areas including the performance of the aircraft’s equipment, engines, systems and flight crew, as well as other factors concerning the dynamics of the approach. One item of particular focus for investigators is expected to be the status of runway approach guidance facilities. An FAA Notam (notice to airmen) for San Francisco indicates that, at the time of the accident, the instrument landing system glideslope for runway 28L was declared out of service from June 1 to Aug 22.
 
  • #10
An FAA Notam (notice to airmen) for San Francisco indicates that, at the time of the accident, the instrument landing system glideslope for runway 28L was declared out of service from June 1 to Aug 22.

And the reason for that, ironically, is because the ILS beacons are being relocated, to move the touchdown point further inland along the runway and reduce the risk of this sort of accident happening.
 
  • #12
jtbell said:
A video of the crash has surfaced. It was shot from about a mile away. You can see the plane doing a cartwheel-like reversal towards the end of its trip down the runway.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/v...f-plane-crash-on-cam.courtesy-fred-hayes.html

That would explain the spinal injuries. Whiplash at 160+ mph. :cry:

I used to fly all the time back when I was young, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I'm not sure when I stopped enjoying it.
It may have been that time I flew to Reno, about 15 years ago, and halfway there, I saw myself in another airplane, passing at a 1000 mph relative speed, with a separation of about 100 yards, with eyes as big as saucer plates.

Note to pilots: As fun as that may be, don't do that. You will lose customers.
 
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  • #14
jim hardy said:
Anyone know how to interpret this site ?


http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/0730Z/RKSI/KSFO/tracklog

Looks like a quick descent with last minute attempt to pull up at only 85 knots, consistent with tail down attitude stall,
but I'm no expert.


thanks spook that's a link from your AW link...

I did a google of landing speeds for 777's and it was 260 kph. (~140 knots)

So obviously, I can't interpret the data from that web site, as for the last minute, the plane appeared to be flying too slowly.

109 knots, just before touchdown? Perhaps there was a 30 knot headwind?

Did another web search and came up with the following:

Nwafflyer

I've been reading all these threads on short flights, and it makes me curious - what is the slowest possible flight speed (without stalling) for a dc-9, a 737, and airbus 319/320 and a 757 ?

Those people do not know how to run a forum. Good god they went off topic.

The closest I could come to an answer was:

RoseFlyer said:
The landing speed is about 140 knots. [for a 777]
 
  • #15
On the national news tonight, there was an official who wouldn't say exactly what the speed was but she stated that it was well below the required speed. The 85 knots at the bottom of Jim Hardy's link looks to match that pretty well. It's really beginning to look like a loss of situational awareness for the flight crew (yes, I know it's waaay too early to know).
 
  • #16
The landing speed was supposed to be 137 knots, and the crew can be heard acknowledging that speed so if they were going significantly slower and their instrumentation indicated that before the landing they must have been really blowing it

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/07/us/plane-crash-main/

Did they just not look at their airspeed meter or whatever it's called when stating they were going 137 knots? Because I feel like that goes beyond situational awareness to full blown incompetence
 
  • #17
Office_Shredder said:
Did they just not look at their airspeed meter or whatever it's called when stating they were going 137 knots? Because I feel like that goes beyond situational awareness to full blown incompetence
Too early to know for sure of course, but using a sort of anthropic principle, logic tells us that in order for there to be an accident these days without bad weather or a major mechanical failure, it requires a spectacular level of incompetence. Remember Air France a couple of years ago? Bad weather and a minor mechanical failure, but still the primary cause of the accident was a spectacular level of incompetence. Very sad.
 
  • #18
So if the plane was approaching at 140 knots at a 350 angle then the vertical velocity is Vy = V sine 350
80 knots = 140knots (.57)
 
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  • #19
russ_watters said:
...a spectacular level of incompetence. Very sad.

Happened to me at work one day. (Hospital, 25 years ago)

I worked in an office just 100 feet from the "Life Flight" landing pad on the top of the building.
Life Flight was coming in, so I peeked my head out the door, and watched the two ER guys waiting for the copter to land.
At one point, they both stopped looking out the tiny 10"x10" windows, and [STRIKE]ran[/STRIKE] bolted in my direction.

I slammed the doors shut, and heard a crash.

The copter pilot had come in too fast, and his tail rotor shredded on the edge of the rooftop.

The patient, and everyone else survived, thank god.

They brought in a crane the next day, and carried the copter away.
 
  • #20
OmCheeto said:
Happened to me at work one day. (Hospital, 25 years ago)

I worked in an office just 100 feet from the "Life Flight" landing pad on the top of the building.
Life Flight was coming in, so I peeked my head out the door, and watched the two ER guys waiting for the copter to land.
At one point, they both stopped looking out the tiny 10"x10" windows, and [STRIKE]ran[/STRIKE] bolted in my direction.

I slammed the doors shut, and heard a crash.

The copter pilot had come in too fast, and his tail rotor shredded on the edge of the rooftop.

The patient, and everyone else survived, thank god.

They brought in a crane the next day, and carried the copter away.

Seems like medical helicopters crash quite a lot! Or, maybe they just make the news more...?
 
  • #22
The crash of flight 214 looks like an honest human error

I'm no expert, but it seems that the pilot misjudged both the speed and the height and tried to pull up. He tried to pull up because he thought he was not going to land the aircraft properly so he was trying to go around and take another shot.

-OR-

His entry speed is too high and he had no choice but to come in at that speed, so he tried to flare as much as possible at the end of the approach but clearly overdone it.


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=cf8_1373231556
 
  • #24
The South Korean jetliner ... 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. ... [NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P.] 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 1 1/2 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.
Where was the supervision? How is it that an inexperience pilot is given the responsibility of landing such an aircraft. He apparently had never landed a 777 at SFO.

Perhaps adding to the pilot's difficulties was the fact that he had little experience landing at the San Fran airport. Hyo Min Lee told the Times that Lee Gang-guk had previously landed there but "not much" with the Boeing 777. She wouldn't specify exactly what that meant. Lee Hyomin, meanwhile, told the AP that Lee Gang-guk had never landed a 777 at SFO before.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slat...f_san_fran.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content

“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.”

. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...705-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html?hpid=z1
 
  • #25
I'm having Air France flashbacks.
 
  • #26
The flight originated in Shanghai with a stopover in Seoul. I don't know where the flight crew started. Seoul to SF is a long flight, 4AM to 2:30PM, so I can imagine fatigue might have been a factor especialy if they started in China.

Apparently the approach was steep and fast.
That runway (28L) has the 4 light glideslope visual indicators on the ground for the pilot to align himself vertically, like these,
vasi.jpg

EDIT: all red lights says the pilot is too low, these red & white lights mean this pilot is on glideslope. (these have changed a bit since my day).

Also the radio glideslope was out for construction so he had to land the plane himself instead of letting the computer track the radio signal.. It's sounding more and more to me like just a bad landing. If the visual indicators were out too I can have some sympathy for the pilot - it's easy to get rusty from over-reliance on automation.
This could be one instance where the computer would have done a better job.
 
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  • #27
russ_watters said:
I'm having Air France flashbacks.

How does someone watch another fly the plane into the ground without doing something until 1.5 seconds before impact? I've seen this again and again with airline pilots, I've only flown a small plane a few times, each time with a trained pilot at my side also at the stick who corrected my every movement. If it turns out to be pilot error the "trainer" seems to be at fault too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-airlines-san-francisco-plane-crash.html?_r=0

“Ultimately, it’s the trainer pilot who is responsible for the flight,” Mr. Yoon, the Asiana president, said, referring to Lee Jeong-min, 49, the more experienced pilot who sat in the co-pilot’s seat when Lee Kang-guk was landing the plane. He had 3,220 hours of flying time with 777s.

“Familiarization flights” are part of the routine for pilots learning to fly a new kind of plane, officials at both the Transportation Ministry and Asiana said. At Asiana, the pilots are required to go through manual and simulator training — Asiana has run its own simulator training center since 1998 — and make 20 familiarization flights in the presence of more experienced “mentor” or “trainer” pilots.
 
  • #28
For those who don't remember/didn't see it, here is the Air France thread:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=317490&page=9

The basic cause of the Air France crash was the pilot at the time just plain did the opposite of what he needed to do to fly the plane - nearly constantly, for four minutes, while the plane dropped out of the sky from 35,000 feet. Under normal circumstances if you pull back on the stick the plane goes up and if you push forward, the plane goes down. But there are two cases where that logic reverses: stall and landing.

*If you are stalling, pulling back on the stick keeps the plane from gaining the speed it needs to recover from the stall.

*If you are landing, the nose-up attitude means the wings are generating a massive amount of drag and as a result, you control speed by varying the pitch and altitude (descent rate) with the throttle. If you are low and you respond by pulling back on the stick, you'll just lose speed and sink faster. Judging by reports of an unusually high nose-up attitude, it is quite possible that that error is what caused this crash.

Crashing on landing due to wrong control input (if that is indeed the cause) may seem like a spectacularly basic mistake for an experienced pilot and surprising that the captain didn't intervene sooner, but the Air France crash was much, much worse because of just how long the error was being made for before anyone realized and attempted to correct it. In this case, the captain (and of course the pilot) may have had just seconds to correct the error, while in the Air France case, they had minutes.

Jim said:
This could be one instance where the computer would have done a better job.
It seems to me like we may have reached a critical mass or tipping point where automation is causing pilots to become less skilled. 10,000 of flight time doesn't mean a whole lot if 9,500 of it was spent watching the autopilot fly the plane! In addition to the stupid mistakes, you also have to wonder how pilots with little stick-and-rudder time would do in true emergencies, such as in The Miracle on the Hudson (captain Sully was a military pilot and therefore had a ton of stick-and-rudder time).
 
  • #29
According to an accident investigator on ABC World News last night, the pilots took the plane completely off autopilot at 82 seconds before landing. They then failed to adjust engine thrust and left them at idle which caused them to fall well below the glide slope. The investigator interview is at the 7 minute mark in the video.
 
  • #30
russ_watters said:
For those who don't remember/didn't see it, here is the Air France thread:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=317490&page=9

The basic cause of the Air France crash was the pilot at the time just plain did the opposite of what he needed to do to fly the plane - nearly constantly, for four minutes, while the plane dropped out of the sky from 35,000 feet. ...

..............
......
....


It seems to me like we may have reached a critical mass or tipping point where automation is causing pilots to become less skilled. 10,000 of flight time doesn't mean a whole lot if 9,500 of it was spent watching the autopilot fly the plane! In addition to the stupid mistakes, you also have to wonder how pilots with little stick-and-rudder time would do in true emergencies, such as in The Miracle on the Hudson (captain Sully was a military pilot and therefore had a ton of stick-and-rudder time).

Bingo.
I'll add to that:
"If you want your pilot to[STRIKE] have [/STRIKE] build stick and rudder [STRIKE]skills[/STRIKE] time, you really oughta leave the stick and rudder in his plane."

Over-automation is mentioned here but it's in that between-the-lines "Execuspeak" language. Unfortunately I'm not yet skilled at cut&paste from PDF's... see paragraph on page 4 starting with "These events can be explained by..."
http://www.bea.aero/fr/enquetes/vol.af.447/note05juillet2012.en.pdf

and here
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor...-447-crash-caused-by-a-combination-of-factors
However, Troadec also made it very clear that BEA was not blaming the pilots alone for the accident:


“If the BEA thought that this accident was only down to the crew, we would not have made recommendations about the systems, the training, etc.”

He went on to say:


“What appears in the crew behavior is that most probably, a different crew should have done the same action. So, we cannot blame this crew. What we can say is that most probably this crew and most crews were not prepared to face such an event.”

In fact, BEA made a total of 25 recommendations (pdf) covering everything from better training of aircrews to changes in display logic to improvements in search and rescue. Training pilots to fly aircraft manually at high altitudes is seen as a major need.

Many of the recommendations also deal with the so-called “automation paradox,” i.e., which as I wrote about for IEEE Spectrum concerns the situation where “the more reliable the automation, the less the human operator may be able to contribute to that success. Consequently, operators are increasingly left out of the loop, at least until something unexpected happens. Then the operators need to get involved quickly and flawlessly.”


I lived on an airstrip with seven airline captains for neighbors.
There's a saying among them: "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going."

Seriously - I really do check the equipment listing on my flight itinerary to avoid Airbuses.

old jim
 
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  • #31
interesting discussion of the approach here:

http://flyingprofessors.net/what-happened-to-asiana-airlines-flight-214-2/

He compares this landing to one by another 777 ten minutes earlier from an energy perspective..

On the other hand, AAR214 was never on a stabilized approach. Until about 30 sec before touchdown, it was high and fast. Only 3 miles out, it's 20 or 25 knots too fast, and 500 feet high. As a result, the pilot no doubt reduced power to intercept the glideslope from above. 1.5 nm out (nominally less than 40 sec from touchdown), he's finally on glideslope and at V ref , but with a high sink rate on low engine power. If he applied power at that point, the engines would take some time (a few seconds) to spool up, and he would further sink below glide slope, slow down, or both.

The situation can be appreciated more precisely (but more technically) by looking at the total energy of the aircraft, that is, the sum of the potential energy due to altitude plus the kinetic energy due to velocity. The total energy is given by


E=mgh+1 2 mv 2

where m is the mass of the aircraft, g is the acceleration due to gravity, h is the height of the aircraft, and v is the velocity. Because we don't know the weight of the aircraft, it's convenient to normalize the energy by mg , yielding the energy height

h E =h+v 2 2g

The plot below compares the energy height for the two aircraft:
energy.png


Note that the energy of UAL852 decreases at a steady rate until about 6 nm out, where the rate of energy dissipation increases, because the aircraft is slowing. At about 3.5 nm out, the rate decreases, because the aircraft has hit its target approach speed and stops slowing down.

AAR214 has a much different trajectory. At about 3 nm out, the rate of energy dissipation increases a lot, because the aircraft is both too high and too fast. As a result, the power is reduced significantly, perhaps even to near idle, in order to simultaneously slow the aircraft and get it down to the glideslope. At about 1.5 nm out, it has about the right airspeed and altitude (and therefore energy), but the energy continues to decrease precipitously. If the pilot added enough power at this point, a safe landing might have been possible. But it takes several seconds for the engines to spool up, and the pilot may not have added enough power or done so early enough, so both the altitude and airspeed continue to decrease below their desired values. Indeed, at the last radar return, AAR214 would have been near its stall speed, and unable to pull up.

disclaimer - it's not an official report. But it looked apropos for a physics forum...

old jim
 
  • #32
Astronuc said:
Where was the supervision? How is it that an inexperience pilot is given the responsibility of landing such an aircraft. He apparently had never landed a 777 at SFO.

Apparently he had plenty of hours experience on other aircraft types, though only 40-50 hours on the 777. Most of the other experience should be direct read-across, right back to his first solo flight.

Looking at the amateur video of the crash, it would be hard to think of a simpler situation for a first visual approach landing. Perfect weather, no wind, approach over water so no thermal turbulence, no obstructions like a mountain in an inconvenient place, etc...

The landing speeds etc for all commercial jet aircraft are very similar - basically because air traffic control have a much easier job if everybody is flying at the same speed and keeping the same distance apart. So even if he couldn't remember the exact design landing speed for a 777, he should have known the right ballpark figure.

The other pilot should have been checking the basics, of course, but asssuming this guy knew how to fly at all, what he did doesn't make much sense to me yet...

Borg said:
...the pilots took the plane completely off autopilot at 82 seconds before landing...

...and that makes no sense at all to me, unless the pilot in command (i.e. the "trainiee") decided to go around (a prefectly sensible decision IMO), but the "instructor" said "no, you can do it kid, just go for it..."

(Pure speculation, but there have been studies of the problems caused in cultures which naturally defer to authority rather than assertively challenge it when necessary)
 
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  • #33
It seems the "trainee pilot" was half way through his 777-specific training (i.e. about 50 hours of 100)

However the "instructor pilot" was flying in that role for the first time :eek:. That might explain a lot. The fact that you can do something doesn't mean you know how to teach, or supervise others!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23249012
 
  • #34
http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_07_09_2013_p0-595503.xml

The instructor pilot in command of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 arriving into San Francisco on July 6 said he had assumed the aircraft’s autothrottle system would keep the aircraft flying at 137 kt. as he and the “pilot-flying” in the left seat guided the 777-200ER to Runway 28L in visual conditions.

Too low and slow on the approach, the aircraft clipped the sea wall leading to the runway threshold with its main landing gear and tail as the pilots attempted to abort the landing. The left-seat pilot was in the process of getting qualified to fly the 777 for the Seoul, South Korea-based airline.
...
The 777 continued to slow as the pilots attempted to “correct a lateral deviation” as it descended from 500 ft. to 200 ft. “At 200 ft., the four PAPIs were red and the airspeed was in the hatched area,” says Hersman. The “hatched” markings on an airspeed tape warn pilots of an impending stall. The instructor pilot at that point recognized that the autothrottle was not maintaining speed and established a nose-high go-around attitude. He attempted to push the throttles forward for more power, but says the pilot-flying had already done so.

Information from the flight data recorder showed that the pilots first increased engine power from flight idle at 125 ft. altitude, reaching 50% thrust 3 sec. before impact.

Not knowing your true air speed while landing when the indicator is right in front of your eyes is inexcusable.
 
  • #35
nsaspook said:
http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_07_09_2013_p0-595503.xml

Not knowing your true air speed while landing when the indicator is right in front of your eyes is inexcusable.

It depends on how many indicators are in front of your eyes.

3224878652_1b80b9a1ce.jpg

A well trained operator would know which one to focus on. An operator with too little experience would be overwhelmed, IMHO.

I believe this may be why they replaced gauges in automobiles with idiot lights. The average person simply can't process that much information, in an emergency situation.

I use the above image, only as an example, as I manned all three of those stations, many, many years ago, and kept the reactor from melting down one day, during a very unexpected "event".

hmmm... Strange to think I could be that competent, being only 22 years old.
Yesterday, I refused to cross the street. (There were cars!)
 

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