Asiana

Investigators seek cause of deadly plane crash San Francisco Det spekuleres veldig mye i dette. Vind under landing er rapportert til opp til 32 knop. Wind Shear er dermed et tema. Sjekk: http://tinyurl.com/4nss45k (Reuters) - U.S. officials examined flight information recorders and began investigating the crash of an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 that burst into flames upon landing in San Francisco, killing two teenaged Chinese students and injuring more than 180 people, officials said on Sunday. There was no immediate indication of the cause of Saturday's accident but Asiana said mechanical failure did not appear to be a factor. The airline declined to blame either the pilot or the San Francisco control tower. Eric Weiss, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said the plane's "black boxes" - the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder - had been recovered and were sent to Washington for analysis. The Federal Aviation Administration also was investigating and Asiana Airlines said on Sunday that Korean accident investigators were on their way to San Francisco. NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said on Sunday there was no indication of a criminal act but it was too early to determine what went wrong. "Everything is still on the table," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press." Investigators in coming days will interview the pilots and look at data from the black boxes, radar equipment and other information to determine the cause of the crash, she said in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union." "It's really important to put all of the pieces of the puzzle together," Hersman said. The plane was coming in from Seoul when witnesses said its tail appeared to hit the approach area of a runway that juts into San Francisco Bay. One witness said the plane appeared to be coming in too low and too fast. The impact knocked off the plane's tail and the aircraft appeared to bounce violently, scattering a trail of debris before coming to rest on the tarmac. SERIOUS INTERIOR DAMAGE Pictures taken by survivors showed passengers hurrying away from the wrecked plane. Thick smoke billowed from the fuselage and TV footage later showed the aircraft gutted and blackened by fire. Much of its roof was gone. Interior damage to the plane also was extreme, Hersman said on CNN. "You can see the devastation from the outside of the aircraft, the burn-through, the damage to the external fuselage," she said. "But what you can't see is the damage internally. That is really striking." The dead were identified as Ye Meng Yuan and Wang Lin Jia, both 16-year-old girls and described as Chinese nationals who are students, Asiana Airlines said. They had been seated at the rear of the aircraft, according to government officials in Seoul and Asiana. The crash was the first fatal accident involving the Boeing 777, a popular long-range jet that has been in service since 1995. It was the first fatal commercial airline accident in the United States since a regional plane operated by Colgan Air crashed in New York in 2009. "For now, we acknowledge that there were no problems caused by the 777-200 plane or (its) engines," Yoon Young-doo, the president and CEO of the airline, told reporters on Sunday at the company headquarters on the outskirts of Seoul. Asiana on Sunday said the flight, which had originated in Shanghai, had carried 291 passengers and 16 crew members. The passengers included 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans, 64 U.S. citizens, three Indians, three Canadians, one French, one Vietnamese and one Japanese citizen. Dale Carnes, assistant deputy chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, said 49 people were hospitalized with serious injuries. Another 132 suffered moderate and minor injuries. Five people were in critical condition at San Francisco General Hospital, according to spokeswoman Rachael Kagan. She said a total of 52 people were treated for burns, fractures and internal injuries. Three people were critical at Stanford Hospital. TOO LOW, TOO FAST Survivor Benjamin Levy told a local NBC station he believed the Asiana plane had been coming in too low. "I know the airport pretty well, so I realized the guy was a bit too low, too fast, and somehow he was not going to hit the runway on time, so he was too low ... he put some gas and tried to go up again," he said in a telephone interview. "But it was too late, so we hit the runway pretty bad, and then we started going up in the air again, and then landed again, pretty hard." Levy said he opened an emergency door and ushered people out. "We got pretty much everyone in the back section of the plane out," he said. "When we got out there was some smoke. There was no fire then. The fire came afterward." Vedpal Singh, a native of India, was on board the flight along with his wife and son when the aircraft struck the landing strip. "Your instincts take over. You don't know what's going on," said Singh, who had his arm in a sling as he walked through the airport's international terminal and told reporters he had suffered a fractured collar bone. Asiana, South Korea's junior carrier, has had two other fatal crashes in its 25-year history. A senior Asiana official said the pilot was Lee Jeong-min, a veteran pilot who has spent his career with the airline. He was among four pilots on the plane who rotated on two-person shifts during the 10-hour flight, the official said. A San Francisco airport spokesman said that a component of the facility's instrument landing system that tracks an incoming airplane's glide path was not working on Saturday. Pilots and air safety experts said the glide path technology was far from essential for a safe landing in good weather. Back to Top

Flight data recorders recovered from Asiana crash Asiana Airlines Flight 214 data recorders were recovered and sent to Washington Boeing 777 crashed Saturday at San Francisco airport, killing two teen passengers NTSB: "Stabilized approaches have long been a safety concern" (CNN) -- Investigators gathered critical clues in San Francisco on Sunday in hopes of solving the mystery surrounding the deadly crash landing of Asiana Airlines Flight 214. Both flight data recorders have been recovered, the National Transportation Safety Board said, from wreckage left by Saturday's tragedy that left two 16-year-old passengers dead. Survivors and witnesses reported the 7-year-old Boeing 777 appeared to be flying too low as it approached the end of a runway near the bay. "Stabilized approaches have long been a safety concern for the aviation community," NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman told CNN on Sunday, saying they represent a significant threat. "We see a lot of runway crashes." "We want to understand what was going on with this crew so we can learn from it," Hersman said. Details of pilot flying at time of crash Passengers recount moment of crash Passengers describe harrowing crash 'The wheels ... were too low, too soon' Hersman said her team hopes to interview the pilots in the coming days. Internal damage to the plane is "really striking," she said, and officials are thankful there weren't more deaths. Nothing, including pilot error, has been ruled out as a possible cause of the crash, investigators said. The recorders have already arrived at an NTSB lab in Washington for analysis. Teen girls Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, both Chinese nationals, were killed in the crash, Asiana Airlines said Sunday. There were 291 passengers and 16 crew members aboard the two-engine jet, which had flown a 10-hour direct flight from Seoul, South Korea. "The tail of the Asiana flight hit the runway and the aircraft veered to the left out of the runway," said Choi Jeong-ho, head of South Korea's Aviation Policy Bureau. Expert: The plane 'should never have been close to the seawall' Airport technology called the Instrument Landing System, or ILS -- which normally would have helped pilots correctly approach the runway -- was not operating at the time, according to a Federal Aviation Administration bulletin. "There are a lot of systems that help support pilots" as they fly into busy airports, Hersman said. Some of these systems alert the pilots. "A lot of this is not necessarily about the plane telling them" that something may be wrong, she said. "It's also about the pilot's recognition of the circumstances and what's going on. So for them to be able to assess what's happening and make the right inputs to make sure they're in a safe situation -- that's what we expect from pilots." San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said that when crews arrived, "some of the passengers (were) coming out of the water. But the plane was certainly not in the water." Witnesses recount the crash Survivors reported hearing no warning from the cockpit before the plane slammed onto the edge of the runway, severing the plane's tail and sending the fuselage spinning on its belly. The crash landing blew a fireball and clouds of smoke into the sky. Passengers scrambled to exit a crash scene that one survivor described as "surreal." Related: Asiana Airlines crash: At a glance Evidence in the investigation will include data that show what action the pilots took during the approach to the airport. The pilot operating the aircraft was a veteran who had been flying for Asiana since 1996, the airline said. On the runway, medics found the bodies of the two Chinese teens lying next to burning wreckage. Remarkably, the other 305 people on the plane survived. Passengers included 70 Chinese students and teachers who were headed to summer camp in the United States, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. "We're lucky there hasn't been a greater loss of life," Hayes-White said. When rescuers arrived, they found some passengers coming out of the water, she said. "There was a fire on the plane, so the assumption might be that they went near the water's edge, which is very shallow, to maybe douse themselves with water," Hayes-White said. While 182 of them were taken to hospitals with injuries ranging from spinal fractures to bruises, another 123 managed to escape unharmed. Some jumped out or slid down emergency chutes with luggage in hand. South Korean investigators will work alongside U.S. investigators. Choi said it could take up to two years to learn exactly what caused the crash. Asiana CEO and President Yoon Young-doo said there was no engine failure, to his knowledge. "The company will conduct an accurate analysis on the cause of this accident and take strong countermeasures for safe operation in the future with the lesson learned from this accident," Yoo Yong-doo says.

Animation Boeing 777 Crash Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash San Francisco