We know quite a bit from the NTSB already in this crash, which is a little unusual. In my legal experience of over 20 years, which includes handling airplane disasters, the NTSB tends to be pretty tight lipped about their findings until their investigation is complete. And those investigations always take many months and sometimes they take years. In this case, the NTSB has been quite strong in its language, if you know how to read between the lines of their press releases and interviews. They’ve made it quite clear that the weather was perfect, there were no impediments to the crafts landings, and there does not seem to be any malfunction of the actual craft. Instead, they state the plane was basically coming in too low, too slow (way too slow) and that the pilot or co-pilot attempted a “fly around” (aborting the landing to circle the airport and come around again), but it crashed instead.
I spoke to a pilot with many years of service, mostly with private and commercial jets. “Butch” (I’m calling him by his childhood nickname) said it seemed to him that Flight 214, a large Boeing 777 airbus, was approaching for its landing at too high an altitude and nosed in at a fairly steep angle to make the runway. Something didn’t go as planned and the plane lost air speed and started to go into a stall. That’s when things probably got panicky in the cockpit, as verbal warnings on the “sink rate” would have been issued loudly by the onboard computer, accompanied by an alarm, and the “stick” or hand controls would have started shaking violently. At this point, the pilot tried to gun his engines to gain altitude and abort the landing. But the plane was too slow and too low, basically “it was a brick committed to gravity” as Butch put it. The plane’s tail struck the runway first, sheared off and the plane careened down the runway on its belly, shedding parts of the fuselage, and suitcases and debris.
Unfortunately, it left two young victims on the runway, too. Two 16 year old female Chinese exchange students were sitting in the back of the plane. The violence of the crash tossed them from the plane and they were killed. Several dozens of people remain in critical condition, with broken backs, burns, internal injuries and severe road rash from the runway. There were over 60 U.S. citizens on the flight and the rest were South Korean and Chinese nationals. We can only imagine the horror their families are experiencing trying to get to their loved ones in the states.
See below for a few pictures of the accident.
NTSB employee with Asiana Airlines 214 “black box” which as you can see is actually orange.
The plane being engulfed in flames. Luckily for the passengers, after the initial fireball, the fire spread fairly slowly allowing most of them to escape from one side of the plane.
An aerial view gives you a good idea of the debris field left by the plane as it bellied down the runway.
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