Comment by marze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marze | Hacker News Reader

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I find air disasters a strangely compelling topic, so I've read all 82 pages of comments on that site. Lots of very experienced pilots post wide range of views.

Here is a list of the likely factors that contributed to the crash, based on my reading of the comments at pprune.com:

poor piloting skills, specifically not monitoring speed during landing, a very basic skill

recent switchover of flight pilot from Airbus to Boeing (Boeing planes have throttles that physically move when the thottle setting is changed by automatic systems, Airbus doesn't)

misunderstanding of details of automatic thrust control

inexperience of pilot conducting the training (new to being trainer, 1st flight apparently)

glide slope system on the runway was inoperable, otherwise would have possibly been used and the crash wouldn't have occurred

possible crew social status issues, a known flight-deck issue in some cultures, where those of lower status are hesitant to correct those of high status, but it doesn't seem likely a big factor here

FLCH 'trap', where if you use a certain type of autopilot setting, you might expect the thrust to keep the speed at or above a certain level with automatic throttle adjustments, but it doesn't happen

To summarize, it appears the two pilots at the control thought the jet was in a mode where it automatic thrust control would maintain an approach speed, but when they increased angle of attack just before landing (basically gliding decent up until then), the speed fell off and the throttles did not move automatically, and they failed to note the falling speed until it was too late to avoid crashing. (once you command full throttle from idle, it takes five seconds for the engines to spin back up.)

If they had actually had the plane in the mode they thought it was in, they would have had a perfect landing of the most routine kind.

I found this site morbidly interesting many years ago: http://planecrashinfo.com/lastwords.htm

I believe PAPI was operable, so there were working glideslope indicators.

Too bad that the PAPI was destroyed in the crash, so there's no way to know for sure if it had a problem that let to the crash. But I don't think the pilots of any of the other flights arriving at SFO that day reported anything.

There are dozens of compelling hypotheses as to why this happened. But op chose to submit this and people are up voting it and following the narrative that it is something about pilots being Korean and their training. I find it unsettling that the crowd of people whom I have thought to be more intelligent than the masses isn't all that better than the majority.

Personally I think the Korea angle is a red herring. The issue seems to me to be training and policy. Various air safety bodies around the world had complained to the safety body in Korea about the levels of training (including practice) of pilots. Foreign trainers were brought to Korea to up the quality and level of pilot training but the training policies themselves don't seem to have changed. This seems to be a case of changing the/some of employees but not the corporate culture; I'd expect similar problems in other companies and countries, I don't think it is unique to Korea / Korean culture.

I think the forum poster also tried to indicate some of these problems are not unique to Koreans. The part at the end about inflated logbooks due to autopilot was interesting to me. Quote from cached page on google:

Finally, I'll get off my box and talk about the total flight hours they claim. I do accept that there are a few talented and free-thinking pilots that I met and trained in Korea. Some are still in contact and I consider them friends. They were a joy! But, they were few and far between and certainly not the norm.

Actually, this is a worldwide problem involving automation and the auto-flight concept. Take one of these new first officers that got his ratings in the US or Australia and came to KAL or Asiana with 225 flight hours. After takeoff, in accordance with their SOP, he calls for the autopilot to be engaged after takeoff. How much actual flight time is that? Hardly one minute. Then he might fly for hours on the autopilot and finally disengage it (MAYBE?) below 800 ft after the gear was down, flaps extended and on airspeed (autothrottle). Then he might bring it in to land. Again, how much real flight time or real experience did he get. Minutes! Of course, on the 777 or 747, its the same only they get more inflated logbooks.

So, when I hear that a 10,000 hour Korean captain was vectored in for a 17-mile final and cleared for a visual approach in CAVOK weather, it raises the hair on the back of my neck.

That's not true. The reason foreign trainers were brought in around the year 2000 was because they needed to Westernize Korean cockpit culture. Modern commercial jetliners (which are made by Western companies) are meant to be flown by two pilots who correct one another, which works well in Western cultures. Korean culture makes this difficult because of its hierarchical nature. In fact, Korean Air (and probably Asiana) banned the Korean language from the cockpit because its inherently hierarchical grammatical patterns were responsible for making the first officers hesitant to correct their captains when they made mistakes.

There are lots of concrete details in that post, by someone with direct experience training these pilots. He offers specific reasons to suspect that they aren't being trained as well as they should be -- the most telling of which, to my mind, is that instructors get fired for holding students to the proper standards.

You seem to be accusing the author and your fellow HN members of racism. I think you didn't read the post carefully. The author goes out of his way to make the point that there were some Korean students he thought did very well -- but they were a small minority.

We need to be able to criticize organizations and their cultures frankly, without that being taken as some kind of ad hominem against the people who work in those organizations. And to the extent that organizational culture is colored by national or regional culture, as it often is, that's fair game too.

Almost all the items in that list are a product of inadequate skills/insufficient training/overconfidence, quite consistent with the op.

The degradation of basic flying skills and over-reliance on autopilot-like systems has been a factor in most recent catastrophes, and in countries where pilots have little chance to practice a lot in small planes (such as Korea, basically no civilian aircraft) you might expect an even greater lack of manual stick/rudder/throttle flying skills.

Obliquely, you make a good point.

We should neither censor ourselves (exclude something) or leap to conclusions before the full verdict is in.

As I know less than fk-all about airlines and airplanes, I'm just reading this stuff, and am trusting in others to make sure the truth comes out, whether it's un-PC or completely innocent.

In fact, I'm amazed at how few plane crashes seem to occur (knock on wood). If any nation produced truly incompetent pilots, it's less likely this would be true.

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