Recorders, Pilot Interviews Will Soon Shed Light on Asiana Flight 214

Experts say they expect investigators to look closely at the interactions of the crew aboard Asiana Airlines Flight 214 as they listen to the voice recordings and conduct interviews with the four pilots aboard the 777 that crashed in San Francisco July 6.

Deborah Hersman, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a press conference today that NTSB was waiting until Korean officials arrived before conducing the interviews. She said cockpit voice recorder experts are beginning to convene in Washington, where they would transcribe critical parts of the mix of Korean and English that the crew speaks on the two-hour recording.

To independent experts PopMech spoke with, the fact that the "crew was vectored in for a 17-mile, straight in, visual approach," as Hersman put it, suggests that one of the two pilots in control of the plane might have known the aircraft was descending on a slope that would leave it short of the 11,000-foot runway.

"Was there a seniority problem? Did the co-pilot feel he could not speak up?" Missy Cummings, a human factors expert and former Navy F-18 pilot, told PopMech.

Independent aviation safety expert Lyle Schaefer said it's much too early to make judgments, but as more information is released, he will be looking for echoes of a 1997 Korean Air crash in Guam that killed 228. "In that case, the airplane was too low and the 1st officer was aware of it but was hesitant to challenge the captain and they hit a hill," Schaefer said by email. In its report on that incident, NTSB blamed the Guam crash partly on the "first officer's and flight engineer's failure to effectively monitor and cross-check the captain's execution of the approach."

Also noteworthy, Cummings said, are reports that one of the four pilots on the plane had limited hours on the 777. Hersman confirmed that one of the pilots was working to earn his rating to fly the 777 and was flying with a "check captain," meaning a training captain.

Hersman said: "When we interview those four crew members, we're going to get a lot more details about their activities, about their work, about their training, about who was the pilot flying, who was the pilot in command in the cockpit at the time of the accident," adding that she might have more details about the crew on Tuesday.

Cummings said that transitioning to a new plane is a big deal, even for experienced airline pilots. Every plane has a different "sight picture," she said, meaning the way the aircraft's nose should appear when relative to the horizon. "When you have a sight picture in one plane, it's [ingrained in] you. It's a skill set you have to relearn," she said. Understanding the sight picture is critical for making a manual landing, which the Asiana crew must have been attempting to do, at least in part.

NTSB had said yesterday that a radio-beacon glide slope indicator used with autopilots and manual landings was not operating due to a construction project at the airport. However, the runway's system of red and white warning lights, called a precision approach path indicator (PAPI), was operating and should have been visible to the pilots. The plane also had GPS aboard, though Schaefer said it might have been of limited help.

"The GPS guidance is new to most of the old timers and may not have been a player in this approach," he said. "?The pilot interviews I am sure should address what guidance they were using and why they did not use what was available to them."

Cummings is in favor of more automation in the cockpit, especially during landings, and she said this crash could prove to be a case in point. "I'm an advocate for using humans in the cockpit in a supervisory role," she said.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/recorders-pilot-interviews-will-soon-shed-light-on-asiana-flight-214?src=rss

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