A Look at the 777 Crash in San Francisco

Patrick Smith:

On Saturday afternoon, an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport killing at least two passengers and injuring dozens more, many of them seriously.

Before getting to the accident itself, I’d like to express my dismay over the media’s shamelessly sensationalistic coverage of it. A certain degree of network hyperventilation always follows air crashes, but this time, from the absurd eyewitness accounts to the at times wildly inaccurate commentary of various aviation “experts,” they’ve taken things to a new level of inanity, ridiculousness and poor taste.

One thing sorely missing has been a sense of perspective. I don’t mean to diminish the seriousness of what happened. It’s a tragedy when anybody is killed in an airplane crash. However, the vast majority of the passengers on Asiana 214 made it off the airplane uninjured. This simply was not an air disaster of the scale that was once relatively common, and is not deserving of terms like “catastrophe.”

Moreover this was the first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America since November, 2001. The streak has ended, but the fact that it lasted nearly twelve years, with some 20,000 commercial jetliners taking off and landing safely in this country every single day, was an astonishing run. Is it perverse to suggest that Saturday’s terrible accident serves to underscore just how safe commercial flying has become?

That’s asking an awful lot, I know, in this race-to-the-bottom era of news coverage, when speed and sizzle — the need to grab and hold, for however long, the ever-shrinking attention span of the average viewer or reader — not accuracy or context, are all that really count.

But consider for a moment the year 1985, one of the darkest ever for commercial air travel. By the end of that year, 27 crashes had resulted in the deaths of almost 2,400 people. These included the Air-India bombing over the North Atlantic, with 329 casualties, and, two months later, the crash of Japan Airlines flight 123 outside Tokyo, with 520 dead. (These, the second and fifth-most deadly accidents in aviation history happened 49 days apart!) Also in 1985 were the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed more than 240 U.S. servicemen, the infamous British Airtours 737 fire, and the crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed137.

Now, as for what may have happened in San Francisco…

About the worst thing we can do at the moment is play fast and loose with speculation. Early theories as to why a plane crashed almost always turn out to be wrong or incomplete. All we know for certain is that the plane crashed short of the runway. That by itself is not a reason; it’s the result of something gone wrong. This isn’t what you want to hear, maybe, but I have no particular hunches or ideas that I’m leaning toward, beyond the fact that the crew found itself in the throes of an unstable visual approach — i.e. below the proper glide path, at too high a speed or a too-high rate of descent, etc. — and failed to correct or abandon the approach. Why the approach became unstable, and why they did not break it off and go around, I can’t say.

Or, it might be something else entirely. Whether the cause turns out to be human error, mechanical error, or some combination of the two remains to be determined.

I would, in the meantime, be wary of what you hear from TV or the press. And be exceptionally wary of on-air testimony from eyewitnesses or passengers who were aboard the jet. The news channels salivate over these firsthand narratives, but any crash investigator will attest to the notorious unreliability of such accounts. If some of the things I heard in interviews over the past 24 hours are any indication, stuff your ears with gauze and leave the room. I don’t want to insult anybody’s powers of observation, but passengers have a horrible habit of misjudging and grossly misinterpreting the basics of flight even when things are running perfectly normally, never mind in the throes of a violent emergency.

Another red herring is the idea that SFO airport is inherently dangerous. Many in the media have been harping on the fact that the airport’s runways are spaced closely together, and the plane was flying a so-called “visual approach.”

Flying into SFO can at times be more work-intensive than flying into some other places, but all pilots are trained to handle the sorts of challenges it presents, and visual approaches, which do not rely on instrument guidance to the extent of the more common ILS approach, are relatively common at large and busy airports.

Meanwhile, looking at some of the footage, I was appalled by the number of passengers who chose to evacuate the burning aircraft * with their carry-on luggage. * We’ve seen this in several on-the-runway evacuations in recent years. Lugging your carry-ons down the aisle in the middle of an emergency, when a few seconds can mean the difference between life and death, is unpardonably reckless.

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