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Boeing 777 Crashes At San Francisco Airport
Asiana Flight 214 from Seoul crashed while landing at San Francisco Airport today. Early reports suggest the plane was unstable as it touched down, which led to the tail of the plane breaking off. There are no official casualty reports yet, but passengers were seen walking off the plane. Preliminary estimates say one or two dead and 75 being transported to area hospitals. (Others are reporting two dead and several dozen injured.) Eyewitness report: "You heard a pop and you immediately saw a large, brief fireball that came out from underneath the aircraft," Anthony Castorani said on CNN. "At that moment, you could see that that aircraft was again starting to lift and it began to cartwheel [Ed: he likely means spinning horizontally, like a top]. The wing broke off on the left hand side. You could see the tail immediately fly off of the aircraft. As the aircraft cartwheeled, it then landed down and the other wing had broken." The media has estimated about 290 people were on board the plane. The top of the cabin was aflame at one point, but it's not known yet whether that affected the passengers. "Federal sources told NBC News that there was no indication of terrorism." Some images from the news make it look like the plane may have tried to touch down too early, hitting the seawall just before the runway.
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/SFO_crash-e1373139561971.png
Shows it upright, with at least one wing still attached.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It didn't cartwheel, it spun around like a top.
Just to elaborate even more (edit function please), anyone who lives around SF and flies knows that the airport is 10 miles south of the city. So an airplane crashing within city limits would be extremely bizarre. Very little air traffic is actually routed through the city...in fact I think most planes that fly overhead are ads for car insurance companies and tires during baseball games.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Samsun Exec. David Eun survives, posts pic. Then proceeds to teach CNN some manners.
The tail broke off, not the wings. And the aircraft didn't "cartwheel". There are many good pictures of the wreckage. The wreckage is sitting on the ground alongside the runway, right side up, wings intact, on its belly. The tail assembly is completely detached from the plane. Much fire damage to the top of the fuselage, which is puzzling.
There are pictures of the passengers evacuating, including, inevitably, one of the passengers who just evacuated taking pictures of the plane.
Too early to discuss causes. Reports indicate the plane landed short in an nose-up attitude, but it's too early to say why.
Samsung VP David Eun was on that plane, that makes it our business.
He posted a picture of the crash: https://path.com/p/1lwrZb. His post says "most everyone" is fine, but that is selection bias. For crashes like this, the injured/dead are usually in one section, and those are NOT the people you see walking away.
There are actually bits of debris on the runway starting almost with the rocks separating the runway from the bay. The integrity of the fuselage says it did not cartwheel (objects this big don't move in one piece like the movies - they'll disintegrate with just moderate lateral forces). But the debris trail and missing tail suggest it came down at a high angle of attack hitting tail-first possibly from a stall (in a regular landing you hit landing gear-first), then hit the ground hard enough to collapse its landing gear and skid off the runway. The jagged yellow partial dome you see at the tail end of the fuselage is the plane's aft pressure bulkhead - the end of the pressurized section of the fuselage. So nobody was in the tail portion which broke off.
The high AOA suggests the pilot was pulling up trying to gain altitude (or at least decrease the rate he was losing it). Possible reasons are an engine problem (with inadequate thrust, pilot was trying desperately to glide a little further to make the runway) or some failure of the flaps (if they retract, they increase the plane's stall speed possibly causing the plane to drop out of the air). Or wind shear (sudden tailwind deprives the plane of lift and pilot pulls up to try to maintain altitude - unlikely given the weather). Or pilot error (was coming in too high and tried to bleed altitude too quickly, instead of declaring a missed approach and trying again), though the tail striking short of the runway makes this unlikely unless the pilot accidentally put the plane into a stall.
Unfortunately, most airplane accidents and incidents are due to pilot error, ATC error and maintenance mechanic error (I think in this order). Problems with hardware or firmware that are unrecoverable in spite of following proper procedures are pretty damn rare. For example, AF447 was not directly caused by any hardware failing - it was due to the pilots not following procedures and good practice.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'm not aware of any passenger aircraft that has such a fly by wire system.
Well, that's your problem, then, since autoland has been around for a while and I have been through a zero visibility autoland landing all the way down to the runway. On exiting the plane, I've asked the first officer if they did it manually or using autoland, she said autoland. It was a by-the-book landing, by the way, as far as I could tell. Very smooth.I could tell it was a bit of a crab landing since the nose swayed right as soon as the main gear touched down. So, it was autoland with side wind, too.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It is not used during take off or landing, and although either could be handled by computer, I'm not aware of any passenger aircraft that has such a fly by wire system. All of them are on the drawing board.
Autoland systems were developed in the 40s and perfected in the 60s by the Brits.
Developed for military purposes and then perfected for commercial purposes because England had endless problems with zero visibility due to their fog + pollution.
Autoland systems are so accurate that a fudge factor was added in, since multiple aircraft will all land on the exact same patch of runway and destroy the surface.
I can't say why you're "not aware of any passenger aircraft that has such a fly by wire system."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system#Special_CAT_II_and_CAT_III_operations
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This is the problem with non-free airplanes. If the blueprints had been free under a freedom preserving license I'm sure the problem that caused the hiccup had been found.
. . . and the plane could have been printed on an off the shelf 3D printer . . .
. . .and from the MakerPlane website:
"MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as...3D printers."
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
For anyone confused by this comment, the original title of this article (before an editor stepped in and fixed it) read "Boeing 777 Crashes In San Francisco". The current title (at the time I'm posting this comment), "Boeing 777 Crashes At San Francisco Airport", is a much better description of the event without taking the mind in some horrific directions before giving the important details.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The pilot HAD to manual land, the ILS system and PAPI glidepath height assistance for runway 28L (and 28R) at SFO is down, as reported in the current NOTAMs(Check for SFO)
That means he was relying on nav beacons and glidepath estimates to come in. Given that SFO's beacons are approx 1.2 miles apart, if he picked the wrong beacon to guild his descent he would have been too high, dropped steeper than usual to get down once he noticed the discrepancy, and didn't have the necessary power to flare and ascend at the end of the runway, so he tailstruck. That makes it pilot error, but confounded and mitigated by most (if not all) the regular guidance and assistance systems they rely on being out of commission.
Except that right now, there's little to no ILS at SFO, as a result of government-mandated construction work to shift the landing zone inland (ironically, to prevent this exact situation), requiring the antennas to be relocated.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Citation: takeoffaviationweather.com. The relevant bits:
KSFO
28 NAVAID Instrument Landing System Runway 28L Glide Path out of service started about 1 month ago ending in about 1 month
28 NAVAID Localizer Type Directional Aid Runway 28R Glide Path out of service started about 1 month ago ending in about 1 month
28 NAVAID Instrument Landing System Runway 28R Glide Path out of service started about 1 month ago ending in about 1 month
23 NAVAID Instrument Landing System Runway 28R Inner Marker out of service until Aug 22 23:59
20 NAVAID Instrument Landing System Runway 28R Category 2/3 Not Authorized started about 1 month ago ending in about 1 month
Emphasis mine.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's both an aural warning and an indicator light. But they ignored about 70 aural stall warnings; they probably ignored the dual input warnings too. Remember, the pilots didn't know they were suffering an instrumentation failure due to iced up pitot tubes. All they knew was that they were getting inconsistent, contradictory, and in some cases impossible readings from their instruments. While trying to figure out what the hell was going on, they got the plane into a high angle of attack, low speed configuration which caused the stall warnings to stop (even though the plane was still in a stall) due to the computer being programed to discount aerodynamic data as unreliable in that state.
When the pilot then gave the plane the correct input (nose down), the plane picked up speed and the stall warnings began again. Completely the opposite of what's actually going on, and probably confused the hell out of the pilots. At that point they probably guessed they were experiencing an electronic/computer problem, and probably began disregarding all the alarms they were hearing.
It's tempting to blame the accident on how easy it is to miss the "dual input" warning during a confusing and dangerous situation where all sorts of warnings are going off, and say that a force-feedback system like Boeing uses is superior. But with Boeing's system, one pilot slumped over or deliberately pushing his control column to crash the plane would hinder the other pilot from controlling the aircraft, possibly causing an accident. With Airbus' system, the conscious pilot just pushes a button and he has complete control. It's not that one method is better than the others, they're just different, and vulnerable to different failure modes. AF447 just happened to hit upon a failure mode of the Airbus system.
It's also worth pointing out that the other two major crashes caused by disorientation following instrument failure were 757s. So while the dual inputs probably added to the confusion, it's still highly likely AF447 would have crashed anyway even without the dual input problem. The overwhelming cause of the accident was spatial disorientation coupled with reluctance to believe the instruments after a systemic failure (the airspeed inputs feed into multiple other systems that update the pilots on the state of the plane).