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还不服气？
Early details suggest crew error led to Asiana 214 crash
More details have emerged surrounding Asiana Flight 214 since it crash-landed at the San Francisco International airport Saturday afternoon, an accident that left two dead and hundreds injured. The Washington Post reports that the president of Asiana Airlines claimed there was no mechanical error. Instead, the pilot has come under a bit of scrutiny — Lee Gang-guk reportedly had only logged 43 hours flying the Boeing 777, though he had logged 10,000 hours flying other planes. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the plane was flying far too slowly during its descent and began to stall — before the pilot gunned the engines in a last-ditch attempt to avoid the crash-landing.
"We're not talking about a few knots here or there. It was significantly below the 137 knots" required for the approach, NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman said. Between the data collected from the flight recorders and the fact that the plane was coming in far slower than it should, the NTSB believes that crew error may have been at fault for the crash — though Hersman said it might be months before the full cause is determined. The NTSB has been updating its Twitter feed with a number of startling images from the crash site, including the interior of the plane as well as the tail section which came off on landing. CNN has obtained amateur video footage of the crash, shot from about one mile away.
"There were walls of water beside the window — before we started hitting earth."
The New York Times has details on the plane's descent, noting that preliminary data shows that the plane dropped 600 feet in nine seconds about a minute and a half before the crash-landing —when it only should have dropped 150 feet in a normal landing. The same report paints a disturbing picture of the landing thanks to an account from survivor Benjamin Levy, who told the Times that instead of seeing the familiar site of the tarmac, he instead saw the San Francisco Bay waters. "The pilot put the gas full steam, and we tipped back up — he went full throttle to regain a bit of altitude," Levy told the Times. "We were so close to the water, the water got sprayed up," Mr. Levy said. "There were walls of water beside the window — before we started hitting earth."
More details have emerged surrounding those on board, as well. According to the Post, the two Chinese teenagers who died were thrown from the plane onto the runway during the crash, but an investigation is underway to determine if one of them died from being run over by an emergency vehicle rather than the crash itself. According to CNN, Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia were two out of 35 total students heading to California to attend a summer church camp. All in all, 182 people were hospitalized following the crash; the Post reports that at least eight passengers were in critical condition as of Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, business is slowly returning to normal at SFO. Two runways were reopened in the hours following the crash, and the SFO's Twitter account has been keeping passengers updated on delays and rescheduled flights. According to USA Today, more than 275 flights were cancelled and another 370 were delayed on Sunday, on top of the nearly 450 cancelled on Sunday.
Read more at theverge.com
