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— The airline acknowledged Monday that the pilot at the controls had little experience flying that type of plane and was landing one for the first time at that airport.
— Investigators reviewed video to determine whether one of the two girls killed might have been run over by an emergency vehicle but reached no firm conclusion.
— The coroner completed autopsies of the girls but will not report for several weeks while he reviews other information.
— The teenagers’ families were expected to arrive Monday in San Francisco and will get autopsy results before they are made public.
— Among the 291 passengers were 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans, 64 Americans, three Canadians, three Indians, one Japanese, one Vietnamese and one person from France.
— Associated Press
Investigators trying to understand why Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash landed focused Monday on decisions made in the cockpit of the giant jet, where an experienced pilot was learning his way around a new aircraft and fellow pilots were supposed to be monitoring his actions.
Authorities also reviewed the initial rescue efforts after fire officials acknowledged that one of their trucks may have run over one of the two Chinese teenagers killed in the crash at San Francisco International Airport. The students were the accident’s only two fatalities.
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman said investigators watched airport surveillance video to determine whether an emergency vehicle ran over one of students. But they have not reached any firm conclusions.
San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said that although autopsies of the two Chinese girls have been completed, he would not report for “at least two or three weeks” whether one of the girls was killed by an emergency vehicle. He said he wants to review written information from the public safety agencies that responded to the crash and audio dispatch files before determining the causes of deaths.
The students had been seated in the rear of the aircraft, where many of the most seriously injured passengers were seated.
The NTSB also said part of the jet’s tail section was found in San Francisco Bay, and debris from the seawall was carried several hundred feet down the runway, indicating the plane hit the seawall on its approach.
Investigators have said Flight 214 was flying “significantly below” its target speed during approach when the crew tried to abort the landing just before the plane smashed onto the runway. Authorities do not know yet whether the pilot’s inexperience with the Boeing 777 and landing it at San Francisco’s airport played a role.
Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyomin said pilot Lee Gang-guk had logged nearly 10,000 hours operating other planes but had only 43 hours in the 777, a plane she said he still was getting used to flying.
It’s not unusual for veteran pilots to learn about new aircraft by flying with more experienced colleagues. Another pilot on the flight, Lee Jeong-min, had about 12,390 hours of flying experience, including 3,220 hours on the 777, according to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in South Korea.
Lee Jeong-min was the deputy pilot, tasked with helping Lee Gang-guk get accustomed to the 777, according to Asiana Airlines.
It was unclear whether the other two pilots were in the cockpit, which seats four. But that would be standard procedure at the end of a long international flight.
New details of the investigation also have raised questions about whether the pilots may have been so reliant on automated cockpit systems that they failed to notice the plane’s airspeed had dropped dangerously low, aviation safety experts and other airline pilots said.
Information gleaned from the Boeing 777’s flight-data recorders revealed a jet that appeared to be descending normally until the last half-minute before impact.
The autopilot was switched off at about 1,600 feet as the plane began its final descent, according to an account of the last 82 seconds of flight provided by Hersman.
Over the next 42 seconds, the plane appeared to descend normally, reaching about 500 feet and slowing to 154 mph, a 777 pilot for a major airline familiar with Hersman’s description said. The pilot spoke on the condition of anonymity because his company had not approved him speaking publicly.
But something went wrong during the next 18 seconds. The plane continued slowing to 136 mph, well below its target speed of 158 mph typical for crossing the runway threshold. By that time, the plane had descended to just 200 feet.
Eight seconds later, with the speed still falling, Hersman said, the throttles were moved forward, an apparent attempt by the pilot to increase speed. But it was too little, too late.
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A key question raised by the NTSB’s account is why two experienced pilots — the pilot flying the plane and another supervising pilot in the other seat — apparently didn’t notice the plane’s airspeed problem.
Part of the answer to that question may lie in whether the pilot flying, after switching off the autopilot, still had the plane’s autothrottle engaged during the descent.
“It sounds like they let the airplane get slow and it came out from under them,” said John Cox, a former US Airways pilot and former Air Line Pilots Association air crash investigator.
“There are two real big questions here: Why did they let the airplane get that slow, and where was the nonflying pilot, the monitoring pilot, who should have been calling out ‘airspeed, airspeed, airspeed,’ ” Cox said.
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