by TONY KIM
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has declared that a culmination of factors led to the crash of Asiana Flight 214 in San Francisco last July 6, including several errors made by the veteran pilot. Three Chinese students died, 182 passengers were injured and 49 were in critical condition from the accident.
Veteran pilot Lee Kang Kuk made several errors prior to landing due to his unfamiliarity with the mechanics of Boeing 777’s autothrottle and auto flight director. According to Yahoo News, one of the central mistakes pilot Lee made was assuming that the autothrottle, which had been on hold, retained the proper speed for landing.
The plane approached the runway too slowly and too low, ultimately resulting in the crash. NTSB faulted both Asiana’s pilot training system and Boeing’s insufficient instruction material for the complex piloting system for the crash.
“In their efforts to compensate for the unreliability of human performance, the designers of automated control systems have unwittingly created opportunities for new error types that can be even more serious than those they were seeking to avoid,” the board’s acting chairman Chris Hart said in the report.
Asiana, headquartered in South Korea, has already began adjusting its training system in accordance with the 27 recommendations made by the board.
