"The co-pilot froze, leaving them too high and off course, Hooper said about the incident, which occurred several years ago. Hooper said he had to take over the controls to get the Boeing Co. (BA) 777 back on track.
“I don’t need to know this,” Hooper said the co-pilot told him later, explaining why a maneuver that’s second nature to most U.S. airline pilots rattled him. “We just don’t do this.”
Sounds like something very similar happened in San Francisco, except they didn't have a western co pilot along with them to correct their fatally flawed flight path. Never would I believe for a second that someone who had made their career as a pilot would not want to know how to land the plane on their own, by hand. Seems that would be a fundamental skill that every thinking pilot would insist on mastering.
"After noticing their plane had slowed to well below the target landing speed, the Asiana Flight 214 pilots didn’t attempt to abort their landing in San Francisco until less than 3 seconds before it struck the seawall, Hersman said."
That's because they likely didn't recognize that there was a problem until 3 seconds before impact.
"While the pilot at the controls had almost 10,000 hours of flight experience, he had flown only 10 legs and 35 hours in the wide-body 777. A management captain making his first flight as an instructor was supervising from the co-pilot’s seat. Another pilot aboard to give the primary pilots a rest break was seated in the rear of the cockpit."
"From the time that the plane descended through 500 feet, the point at which Boeing advises pilots to abort if they aren’t sure the landing is set up properly, none of the crew voiced concerns until the final seconds before the crash, according to Hersman."
It's time for American aviation authorities to recognize that other nations don't have the tradition or experience with flying by hand that seems to have developed organically here, and to therefore stop assuming that all pilots are competent to land the giant jets on their own. In most of Asia, I'd bet, there is no network of public airports, as there is in North America, to teach manual landing. In a modern plane, the automation is so complete that a pilot really is there to program the computer, and maybe troubleshoot if necessary, but not usually to fly the jet. In North America, it is assumed that anyone who has reached the pinnacle of their profession as a jumbo jet pilot can land pretty much anything by hand if needed. That isn't necessarily the case elsewhere.
This issue needs to be recognized and addressed by all, or this sort of accident will "mysteriously" continue to occur.
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