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Pilots Tried to Abort Landing Before Crash, N.T.S.B. Says Pilots Tried to Abort Landing Before Crash, N.T.S.B. Says
(about 3 hours later)
SAN FRANCISCO — The chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday that pilots of the Asiana Airlines jetliner that crashed a day earlier in San Francisco tried to abort the landing just seconds before the crash. SAN FRANCISCO — The nearly 11-hour trip across the Pacific had gone smoothly as Asiana Flight 214 approached San Francisco International Airport — an uneventful flight for the 291 passengers, including dozens of Chinese teenagers who were arriving for a summer camp to study English and to tour colleges.
The safety board chairwoman, Deborah Hersman, said Sunday at a briefing that a crew member called for an increase in speed seven seconds before the plane clipped an embankment at the edge of the runway. She said the plane was traveling well below the speed needed to maintain a stable angle of approach. The jetliner’s cockpit recorder included the sounds of an automatic shaking of the control yoke just before the crash, an indication that the plane was about to stall. But from seat 30K, Benjamin Levy knew something was wrong. Outside his window, as the plane approached the airport where Mr. Levy, a frequent traveler, knew there should have been tarmac, there was instead a terrifying sight: the waters of San Francisco Bay.
The device also recorded a pilot’s voice calling for a go-round 1.5 seconds before the crash. While the engines responded normally, the move came too late to prevent the crash, Ms. Hersman said. The plane’s tail section then snapped off, and the plane skidded across the runway and caught fire. “The pilot put the gas full steam and we tipped back up. He went full throttle to regain a bit of altitude,” Mr. Levy said, speaking from his home on Sunday, a day after he survived the crash landing that killed two 16-year-old girls among the group of Chinese students and injured 180 of the passengers arriving from South Korea.
Ms. Hersman’s description of how the plane slowed generally tracks other data showing the jetliner began to descend too fast because it did not have enough airspeed. Data collected by an aviation firm suggested the plane was descending more than four times faster than normal shortly before it crashed. “We were so close to the water, the water got sprayed up,” Mr. Levy said. “There were walls of water beside the window — before we started hitting earth.”
At 800 feet over San Francisco Bay, the plane was descending at 4,000 feet a minute on Saturday, according to data gathered from FlightAware, a company that listens to navigation broadcasts and sells the data to airlines and others. The normal approach profile is 600 to 800 feet a minute. When the screaming ceased inside the battered Boeing 777, the plane rested on its belly, with its tail and engines sheared by the crash.
At the briefing, Ms. Hersman focused mainly on whether the pilots erred while making a series of calculations needed to land. The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday that the pilots came in too slowly, took too long to realize it and tried to abort the landing seconds before the crash. Hours later, the South Korean Transport Ministry said the co-pilot, Lee Kang-guk, who had only 43 hours of experience flying a 777, was at the controls at the time of the accident.
While the pilot should have recognized the abnormally strong descent, the safety board also said Sunday that it was investigating whether construction at the airport — which had temporarily shut down an electronic system that helps guide pilots to the proper landing slope — might have played a role in the crash. “For now, this itself should not be cited as if it were the cause of the accident,” Chang Man-hee, a senior aviation policy official at the ministry, said by telephone. “Mr. Lee himself was a veteran pilot going through what every pilot has to when switching to a new type of plane.”
“The glide slope had been out since June,” Ms. Hersman said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” In a dramatic moment-by-moment account, the N.T.S.B.’s chairwoman, Deborah A. P. Hersman, suggested that crew members had little inkling of the impending crash until about seven seconds before impact, when one is heard on a cockpit recorder calling for an increase in speed. The call came too late. Three seconds later, an alarm sounded a warning that the plane was about to stall, Ms. Hersman said. One-and-a-half seconds before impact, the pilots advanced the throttles to get more power in an attempt to avert a crash, but before the plane could gain altitude it hit the sea wall, snapping off its tail section before skidding to a stop and catching fire.
“We’re going to take a look into this to understand it,” she said. “But what’s important to note is there are a lot of tools that are available to pilots.” Ms. Hersman’s comments, delivered at a news briefing, were based on preliminary data provided by the Boeing 777’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. Other data from a private firm, FlightAware, indicated that as the plane lost forward speed, it descended much faster than normal.
The FlightAware data indicated that at 100 feet above the water, the plane was descending at more than 270 feet a minute when it should have been slowing to a rate of a few feet per second. FlightAware’s data is not as precise as the information available to investigators from the plane’s flight data recorder, which the safety board began examining on Sunday. But it provides an indication that in the last moments of the flight, unless there was some as-yet undisclosed mechanical problem, crew members, from their own instrumentation, should have been aware that the plane was descending too fast. Ms. Hersman stressed that investigators could not yet draw any conclusions about the cause of the crash, which left two people dead and over 180 injured. But she did not indicate any sign of a mechanical malfunction and focused almost exclusively on the actions of the pilots as they prepared for landing.
Aviation experts said that the pilots, who were both veterans, could have also relied on red and white signal lights on the runway to visually guide the plane to touch down or, if they chose, on the plane’s onboard computers to generate the angle of approach. “Everything is on the table right now,” she said. “It is too early to rule anything out.”
Witnesses and passengers have described the jetliner as coming in too low and clipping a rocky embankment at the edge of the water just before the runway. The plane’s tail section then snapped off, and the plane skidded across the runway and caught fire. Saturday was clear, with light winds, no wind shear and visibility of up to ten miles, Ms. Hersman said. Air traffic controllers had cleared the Asiana flight for a visual approach — meaning no guiding instruments were needed to land the plane.
Two passengers were killed, and at least 180 people were injured. The dead passengers were identified on Sunday as two 16-year-old Chinese students on their way to a summer camp. The students, both women, were believed to have been seated toward the back of the passenger jet, said Yoon Young-doo, the president of Asiana Airlines. Their bodies were found on the runway. What happened to the passengers depended in part on where they were sitting.
Mr. Yoon said Asiana Airlines did not believe there was anything wrong with the Boeing 777, which had been bought in 2006. At least 180 people were injured in the crash. Near the front of the plane, including the first class cabin, some passengers left the plane clutching their carry-on luggage. In the center of the plane where Mr. Levy sat there was no inflatable chute, as there were at other exits. At the very rear of the plane, which bore the worst of the crash damage, overhead compartments had opened upon impact, raining luggage onto the seated passengers. Mr. Levy said there was a woman with her leg crushed between two seats, which had become uprooted. Mr. Levy and others worked to free her.
“So far, we don’t believe that there was anything wrong with the B777-200 or its engine,” he said. He also apologized for the crash, saying, “We are deeply sorry for causing the trouble.” Another woman near her was unconscious. “She wouldn’t move. There were two other guys, we couldn’t pick her up,” Mr. Levy said.
The flight had originated in Shanghai and left Seoul, South Korea, for San Francisco, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. The two students, the Chinese news media reported, were from Zhejiang Province in eastern China. Of the 291 passengers on board, 141 were Chinese, including at least 70 students and teachers on their way to summer camps, the Chinese news media reported. Suddenly, through the hole in the tail of the plane, a firefighter charged in, rushing Mr. Levy and the remaining passengers out as smoke billowed. The jetliner was on fire.
Asiana Airlines identified the two students as Ye Meng Yuan and Wang Lin Jia. They were among 30 high school students from the town of Jiangshan who were planning to attend a 15-day English language program at California universities, the Oriental Morning Post, a Shanghai newspaper, reported. The school has been organizing similar summer programs for more than a decade for students who typically pay about $5,000 to attend, the newspaper reported. Five teachers were accompanying the students. On Sunday, hospital medical officials said that nearly all of the most grievously injured passengers had been in the rear of the plane, including six people in critical condition with spinal injuries, paralysis and head injuries, and a few with what was described as “road rash” as if they had been dragged.
Another 30 students and 6 teachers from Shanxi Province in northern China were also aboard the flight, Xinhua, China’s official news service reported. One teacher from that group was reported injured. It was not clear where the two girls who died were seated on the plane; both bodies were found on the tarmac. One of the bodies, found on the ground to the left side of the plane, may have been run over by a fire truck or other emergency vehicle in addition to her injuries from the crash, Robert J. Foucrault, the San Mateo County Coroner, said Sunday.
Ms. Wang’s parents were waiting with a group of other parents from their daughter’s school when they were told of her death. They “burst into tears,” according to Zhejiang Online, a news Web site. Mr. Foucrault said his examination was not complete, so he could not confirm that was the case.
In San Francisco on Sunday, federal investigators continued piecing together the events that led up to and caused the crash. Jang Hyung Lee, 32, was seated with his wife and their 15-month-old son in the first row in economy class. He said he heard a distant thump, then a few seconds later, a louder thump, and then saw the flames of an engine on fire to the right.
Ms. Hersman of the safety board said that there was no indication of a criminal act, but that it was too early to determine what went wrong. He said he was lucky to be sitting toward the front of the aircraft. Doors opened. He lined up to slide down the chute, clutching his baby in a strap-on carrier on his chest. His wife grabbed the diaper bag.
“Everything is still on the table,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The evacuation, at least in the front of the plane where the Lee family sat, was calm and orderly.
When the Asiana flight crashed, some of the normal landing aids on the airfield were out of service, but the landing should have been well within the capabilities of the airplane and the crew, aviation experts said. “It wasn’t really chaos; people actually took their hand carriers,” Mr. Lee said. “People in front, they were pretty much okay. We could walk out by ourselves.”
“Even if it was the least experienced crew in Asiana Airlines, the maneuver that led to this crash, on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, this was a 2 or 3 at the most,'’ said Oscar S. Garcia, the chairman of InterFlight Global Corporation, a consulting firm. His in-laws in business class said luggage fell from the overhead compartments. His mother- in-law somehow knocked out a front tooth and his father-in-law is suffering from back pain, he said, but they both made it safely down another chute to waiting paramedics.
A government official in Washington said that the instrument landing system, which electronically guides a pilot to the runway, had been out of service for several weeks because of construction at the end of the runway. Another system, which uses patterns of red and white lights to visually guide pilots, was in service, the official said. Xu Da, the production manager at Taobao, the Chinese shopping Web site, wrote on Sina Weibo, a Chinese blogging site, that he smelled “ the smoke, and saw the flames.”
Airlines had been told that the system was out of service, and many carriers, including Asiana, had been landing for weeks on that runway without difficulty, the official said. Air traffic control tapes indicate that the controller cleared the plane for a visual approach, for which the system was not necessary. Nevertheless, like many other passengers, he wrote that he grabbed his carry-on bags before leaving the plane.
Still, some experts said that pilots often have little opportunity to practice landings without the aid of such technology, particularly on international flights into large, technologically advanced airports like San Francisco International. “I grabbed my bags as soon as it stopped,” he said of the plane. “My wife was very calm — she even picked up the scattered stuff on the ground,” he wrote, adding that the couple took their child and bags as they turned toward the rear. “There was a huge hole, quite round, so we rushed out there.”
Kirk Koenig, a pilot with a major American carrier, said that before flying into San Francisco International last week, he could not remember the last time he had made a purely visual landing. Strapped into his exit row midway in the plane, Mr. Levy thought his ribs had been broken. Nonetheless, he stood up inside the shattered aircraft, pried open the emergency door and began to shout out directions.
“You don’t always need it,” he said, referring to the instrument landing system. “But it’s a nice little aid to know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.” “We were left on our own, there was no message from the pilot, from the crew, there was no one. We had to help each other out,” Mr. Levy said, describing how he and others stayed in the plane as they hustled other passengers out, shouting for people to keep calm, while 30 to 40 people exited the door beside him.
Several dozen people remain at hospitals, though many have been discharged. On Sunday, there were still 19 patients at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, down from a high of 53 on Saturday. Of those, six, including one child, are critically injured, said Rachael Kagan, a hospital spokeswoman. The flight had a crew of 16, including four pilots who switched off during the flight in two-man rotations. Korean officials said the captain at the time of the landing was Lee Jeong-min, who had more than 12,000 hours of overall flight experience and 3,220 hours in Boeing 777s. But the co-pilot, Lee Kang-guk, 46, was at the controls. He had almost 10,000 total flying hours, with just 43 in 777s, Korean officials said.
The force of the crash fractured the spines of several passengers, causing paralysis in some cases, Dr. Margaret Knudson, the hospital’s chief surgeon, said at a news conference. Others, she said, had severe road rash as if they had been dragged. She said doctors had expected to see burns, but that there were few. Ms. Hersman said that an electronic system called a glide slope indicator, which keeps planes at the proper descent angle, had been turned off, but that the crew should have known this, and that other tools were available to the pilots.
Of the patients who could speak, she said, all said that they were in the back of the plane when it crashed. “Pilots have available to them a number of options for how to get the plane in on the right speed, on the right approach, on the right path,” Ms. Hersman said.

Norimitsu Onishi reported from San Francisco, and Ravi Somaiya from New York. Reporting was contributed by Vindu Goel, John Markoff and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco; Christopher Drew, Jad Mouawad, Marc Santora and Michael Schwirtz from New York; Matthew L. Wald from Washington; and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea. Susan Beachy, Shi Da and Stephanie Yang contributed research.

Another tool, known as a localizer, which allows planes to line up along the center of the runway, was operating, as were the airport’s red and white lights that visually guide pilots to the runway.
Pilots can also use onboard GPS-based equipment to guide their approach to the runway.
Airlines had been told that the glide slope system was out of service, and many carriers, including Asiana, had been landing for weeks on that runway without difficulty, the official said. Air traffic control tapes indicate that the controller cleared the plane for a visual approach, for which the system was not necessary.
Some experts said that pilots often have little opportunity to practice landings without the aid of such technology, particularly on international flights into large, technologically advanced airports like San Francisco International.
Still, given that the weather was ideal and the guide lights were on, making a visual landing should not have been difficult for most commercial pilots, aviation experts said.
“Even if it was the least experienced crew in Asiana Airlines, the maneuver that led to this crash, on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, this was a 2 or 3 at the most,” said Oscar S. Garcia, the chairman of InterFlight Global Corporation, a consulting firm.

Norimitsu Onishi reported from San Francisco, Christopher Drew and Sarah Maslin Nir from New York, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta from San Francisco; Michael Schwirtz, Ravi Somaiya and Jad Mouawad from New York; David Barboza from Shanghai; and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea. Jack Begg contributed research.