777 Crash in San Francisco
 

Flight from South Korea, no news on casualties but from the live feed it does not look too good :(

Boeing 777 crashes while landing at San Francisco airport - U.S. News

Edit: Some reports indicating no fatalities at this point, which would be amazing considering the tail ripped off on landing and the plane caught fire. Sure hope this is the case.

Path — David Eun

twitter photo from one of the passengers

Twitter Account from a passenger. "I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I'm ok. Surreal..."

Damn it Foz, faster than me :)

(blows smoke out of his internet pistol, holsters it) ;)

I guess the good part of flying from Seoul to San Fran is that most of the fuel is consumed by that point.

That pic is very encouraging. Passengers deplaning from an area that looks heavily damaged by fire, maybe everybody got off before the flames & smoke spread.

Not sure of my buddy's source, but he mentioned to me "No fatalities reported, one person airlifted to SF General. All 303 accounted for."

Always amazed this doesn't happen more often...

Looks like the plane tail smacked the jetty before the runway, and caused issues.

That really is amazing, also saw another report saying the same thing. Hoping it bears out.

Witness's did mention the tail hit first and sheared off, they the wheels hit, the plane lost stability and veered off the runway.

I'm not making light of anything, but whenever something like this happens - big scary plane incident without fatalities (hopefully) what happens to these passengers once they get to the airport? Does the airline just re-book them on new flights since they've missed their connections? Do they get sequestered into some room where they're offered a bunch of money and frequent flyer miles if they promise not to sue? It must be totally surreal to just continue on in your trip after the roof of your last plane got ripped off. Are they just all, "well, that was a setback time-wise, but they gave me a $10 voucher to the airport TGIF's, and if I hit that now I can make my next flight".

Ya know I never thought of that. I curious as well..

CNN was just interviewing one of the passengers, and he said they are being sequestered while waiting for the FBI (or some other agency...don't know if he was sure) to interview them.

Adding to the complexity - it was an international flight, so passengers need to clear customs and most should be without their documents.

Twitter said two dead.

USA Today just said there are sixty still unaccounted for. :(

That is incorrect. Only 1 unaccounted for this far and 2 confirmed deaths.

Can't blame USA Today (or any outlet) for that one. It was pretty straight from the horse's mouth at the time

Yep. Pretty poor info to send out. Wonder how much longer this individual stays fire chief.

New info just confirmed all accounted for with 2 fatalities.

I think it's also possible that the number went from 60 down to nothing/nearly nothing over the course of an hour or two. There were some articles that mentioned how they were trying to determine exactly where some of the survivors were taken immediately after they escaped. If one group was taken to another part of the airport (hypothetically) and wasn't with the rest, that could be "unaccounted for" until everyone was eyeballed by whomever was doing the official headcount.

So the fire chief should be canned for giving out inaccurate information in the midst of a crisis situation?

Gotta love America.

That's probably true, but they need to have more media savvy than that and know that "60 unaccounted for" will be splashed among all of the news front pages with the purpose of implying "probably 60 burnt corpses that we can't identify yet".

Why? That's not their job. Maybe they need more PR flacks, but given budget cuts and prioritizing that's not exactly high on their budgetary list I'm sure.

It is the fire chief's job to communicate information to the public, especially when it's a major city like that. You don't need a PR degree or a budget to know that if you tell the media, "there are 60 unaccounted for, but they aren't presumed dead," the media will leave out the second half and put the first half on the front of their website. It's not a huge deal, and the media is more to blame (I'm impressed CNN and Fox News didn't just announce "60 DEAD!", they're apparently learned some restraint in the last few months).

People think PR is easier than it is.

That's what it looked like to me. Not knowing the complete picture, I'm suspecting pilot error at this point.

Don't believe weather was an issue. Pilots were making visual approaches and the pilot didn't express any concerns about aircraft performance to ATC. The debris pattern indicates they touched down quite a bit early.

From the speculation I have seen, it seems like the landing gear may have hit the sea wall before the tail, which might explain why the landing gear apparently ended up in the water and why the engines were removed from the wings.

From what I have read he was coming down at a weird angle, a lot different than most people had seen with the other planes landing.

I used to fly into SFO all the time and it was a cool landing, the view and everything, but coming down at any angle but what I am used to, I could see it turning into something like this.

edit: Found what I read

"I know the airport pretty well, so I realized the guy was a bit too low, too fast, and somehow he was not going to hit the runway on time, so he was too low ... he put some gas and tried to go up again," Levy said. "But it was too late, so we hit the runway pretty bad, and then we started going up in the air again, and then landed again, pretty hard."

Especially in the midst of a crisis situation I'd imagine. Not like they have a "crisis management PR person" on staff/on retainer anymore due to budget issues (if they ever did, which I bet they didn't).

+1

After spending years flying around Anchorage, I can safely say that I wouldn't fly on any of those Asian carriers. Yikes. Too much anecdotal evidence that their training and experience is not even close to US standards.

Looking more and more like pilot error.

I remember Malcolm gladwell had a chapter in "Outliers" about Korea Air having more pilot error crashes than any other airline because of cultural boundaries with superiors.


Here is a link and quote where this is mentioned:
Malcolm Gladwell on Culture, Cockpit Communication and Plane Crashes - The Middle Seat Terminal - WSJ

In addition to weather and pilot fatigue, he blames those crashes on crew members whose cultural legacy made them too deferential to communicate clearly that the plane was about to crash.”

Yep, saying the landing navigational program was turned off.

To add to the cultural communications and pride issues, the Soviets back in the day shot down a KAL 747 for flying into Soviet airspace. Other Korean pilots in the air that could track that planes position warned them that they were off course and a failure to identify themselves to the Soviets when they challenged them. The pilot simply refused to believe he was wrong or there was too much shame in admitting error. I'm not sure how that helps in this case to communicate, but I definitely see it as a shortfall in the Korean culture.

Apparently the station hired Ron Burgundy as their news director. I kept thinking I'd find something that explained that this was a hoax but having media ethics gurus Poynter cover the story makes it pretty official.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/m...asiana-pilots/

Here's the station's apology:


If they did in fact call the NTSB to verify, I'm sure the NTSB guy thought it was a joke and not a real inquiry.

IIRC, the NTSB has denied that anybody told anybody anything.

Ok but how the fck did somebody still not notice those were joke names? It has to be a disgruntled employee at some sage, surely

NTSB Guy 1: Hey Bob, remember that guy who called in this morning, claiming he was from KTVU wanting to verify those joke names, and we went along with it?

NTSB Guy 2: Yeah, that guy was a moron.

NTSB Guy 1: Turns out he actually was with KTVU and they broadcast those names!

NTSB Guy 2: GTFO

oooops

Or a quality immature graphics kid

SI

This just might be what happened.

Press Release July 12, 2013

Nothing like letting the interns confirm details of a major plane crash. Hey, everybody on the plane died! Did we say died? We meant there were people on the plane! Our bad...

No severance packages for interns. Pack your stuff up.

I'm sure the job of the intern wasn't to do that.