SAN FRANCISCO PLANE CRASH Official probes if rescuers ran over victim

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO

Pilots of Asiana Flight 214 were flying too slowly as they approached San Francisco airport, triggering a cockpit warning that the jetliner could stall, and they tried to abort the landing but crashed barely a second later, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.

While federal investigators began piecing together what led to the crash, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault disclosed that he was looking into the possibility that one of the two teenage passengers who died Saturday actually survived the crash but was run over by a rescue vehicle rushing to aid victims as the plane burst into flames. Remarkably, 305 of 307 passengers survived the crash and more than a third didn’t even require hospitalization. Only a small number were critically injured.

Accident investigators are trying to determine whether pilot error, mechanical problems or something else was to blame for the crash. At a news conference, NTSB chief Deborah Hersman disclosed the Boeing 777 was traveling at speeds well below the target landing speed of 137 knots per hour, or 157 mph.

“We’re not talking about a few knots,” she said.

Hersman said the aircraft’s stick shaker — a piece of safety equipment that warns pilots of an impending stall — went off moments before the crash. The normal response to a stall warning is to increase speed to recover control.

There was an increase several seconds before the crash, she said, basing her comments on an evaluation of the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that contain hundreds of different types of information on what happened to the plane.

And at 1.5 seconds before impact, there was a call for an aborted landing, she said.

The new details helped shed light on the final moments of the airliner as the crew tried desperately to climb back into the sky, and confirmed what survivors and other witnesses said they saw: a slow- moving airliner.

Pilots normally try to land at the target speed, in this case 137 knots, plus an additional five more knots, said Bob Coffman, an American Airlines captain who has flown 777s. He said the briefing raises an important question: “Why was the plane going so slow?”

The plane’s Pratt & Whitney engines were on idle, Hersman said. The normal procedure in the Boeing 777, a wide-body jet, would be to use the autopilot and the throttle to provide power to the engine all the way through to landing, Coffman said.

There was no indication in the discussions between the pilots and the air traffic controllers that there were problems with the aircraft.

Among the questions investigators are trying to answer was what, if any, role the deactivation of a ground-based landing guidance system played in the crash.

Such systems help pilots land, especially at airports like San Francisco where fog can make landing challenging.

Altogether, 305 of the 307 people aboard made it out alive in what survivors and rescuers described as nothing less than astonishing after a frightful scene of fire burning inside the fuselage, pieces of the aircraft scattered across the runway and people fleeing for their lives.

The flight originated in Shanghai, China, stopped over in Seoul, South Korea, before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco.

The South Korea-based airline said four South Korean pilots were on board, three of whom were described as “skilled.”

Foucrault said an autopsy he expects to be completed by today will involve determining whether the girl’s death was caused by injuries suffered in the crash or “a secondary incident.”

Foucrault said one of the bodies was found on the tarmac near where the plane’s tail broke off when it slammed into the runway.

The other was found on the left side of the plane about 30 feet away from where the jetliner came to rest after it skidded down the runway.