NTSB Releases Initial Findings On Asiana Crash

all for one..not. someone is getting thrown under the bus..and probably in jail too.

This is horribly unnerving and reminiscent of the cultural, communication, and training issues Korean Air had in the previous decade which resulted in several high profile crashes. Although I know the Korean and several of the Chinese carriers have very nice premium class products, beautiful hub airports, and great award availability, I'm not certain I would be entirely comfortable flying them.

This raises the question -- Is it safe to fly Asiana?

@GENE - the answer can only be NO

same ridiculousness the other korean airline went through.

So interesting. I'm not a pilot, so I don't have any expertise on cockpit operations. But, while calling out "sink rate" may be standard, it seems like it might have been more helpful to recommend a solution -- "recommend you increase power," for example.

Seems like in addition to "culture" having an effect here, there were some other failures along the way: namely, the trainee's decision to keep flying despite his own misgivings about his preparedness, and the instructor on the NRT flight's failure to keep him out of the cockpit after observing his inadequacies.

The quotes beg the question - Why bother paying a pilot on any Asiana flight, since none of them really fly the plane and merely just watch & program the flight computers. It's simply amazing that they would actually say they don't feel comfortable manually flying the planes.

theBOAT, it's incorrect to say that pilots "merely" program and watch flight computers. That is not an easy task in itself, and it takes years of training and experience to do it right.

The right reaction to the new Lucky posted is not to denigrate pilots (including Asiana pilots) for being "mere" computer operators, but to wonder why Asiana did not emphasize the most basic airmanship. Landing a plane without "instruments" (actually, landing *always* uses instruments; it's a question of which ones) in clear visibility is the most basic of piloting skills. Asiana needs to be called to account for letting their pilots fly planes without being adequately trained on such a basic task.

I think this is an extremely misleading post.

First of all, with a headline of "NTSB releases initial findings..." the lack of a link to the actual release is a glaring omission.

Second of all, the quotes are selected from newspapers looking to drive viewership and sell copies. You have selected a subset of them and left out others, further spinning the story.

What's missing in the facts is that there are concerns about the Human/Computer Interface in the 777 (and 787) that caused the pilot to inadvertently set the throttles to idle rather than maintaining the normal approach speed. The fact that 787 pilot manuals apparently have a written warning about the way the autothrottles work suggest that the H/CI is a contributing factor.

The NTSB will issue a report with the final probable causes of the crash [and they have not done so yet], but anyone who minimizes it to "pilot error" and thinks it's culture, lack of training, and lack of experience is pushing an agenda not reporting the entirety of the facts.

@AS, be sure to call out CNN, SFGate, and Yahoo News for also not linking to the report. Fair is fair, right?

"anyone who minimizes it to “pilot error” and thinks it’s culture, lack of training, and lack of experience is pushing an agenda not reporting the entirety of the facts."

I agree that more was likely at play than simply pilot error or inadequate training - there is pretty much always a whole array of distal and proximal causes for any event like this. But from what was posted on SFGate and elsewhere, it is crystal clear that inadequate training was *one of the factors* that contributed, and I do not think that I or anyone else who draws that conclusion from those news stories is necessarily "pushing an agenda."

"Drawing a conclusion" is not the same as "pushing an agenda".