Asiana Airlines Flight 214

This accident accord on July 6, 2013, The Asiana Airlines Flight 214 flight was from Seoul, South Korea to San Francisco, California. It was not a normal flight in to the San Francisco airport because the run way was under construction so that meant the pilot would have to do a visual landing. He would not be able to use any of his aircraft guidance system to assist him in landing the aircraft at San Francisco airport. The pilot was already nervous as it was before flying this aircraft because he was a trainee in the Boeing 777 but was an experienced pilot with the Korea based airliners. He had less than 45 hours in the Boeing 777 and was not confident the day of the crash. The pilot had flown in to this tricky airport in 2004 so it 9 years this pilot had not been to this airport. It was a place he was unfamiliar with and lacked confidence.

The other crew members with him were another trainee, instructor pilot, and first officer. When the pilot was making the visual approach he had no landing aids and had to line up the massive Boeing 777 by looking out the windshield, to center the aircraft. When he was making his approach the first officer raised concerns about four times that planes descent is to rapidly but no one in the cockpit said anything. The crew did notice some worry/concern on the pilots face when he was making his approach but didn’t say anything. He says in statement that he was very nervous and did not want to make the landing but did it because others had landed at the San Francisco airport under the same circumstances. He told investigators, “He could not say he could not do the visual approach.” - (Staff, December 11, 2013) the pilot was worried that he would fail if he spoke up and did not want to land the plane. In the case it is easy to tell that the issues here are lack of training, confidence, fear of being able to speak up, and fear of embarrassment. Which none of these should have been the case that day because they are all preventable things. In this accident three people died and over 200 injured but one of the three died not because of the crash but the passenger was hit by a firefighter truck. Aviation leaned a lot for the investigation to prevent these kind of accidents from happing again.

References
Staff, K. (December 11, 2013). Asiana pilot who crashed at SFO was worried about landing. http://www.khou.com/story/news/2014/07/24/12279432/.