By Sarah McBride and Hyunjoo Jin
SAN FRANCISCO/SEOUL (Reuters) - The pilot of the crashed Asiana
plane at San Francisco International Airport was still in training for
the Boeing 777 when he attempted to land the aircraft under supervision
on Saturday, the South Korean airline said.
Lee Kang-kuk was the second most junior pilot of four on board the
Asiana Airlines plane. He had 43 hours of experience flying the
long-range jet, the airline said on Monday.
The plane's crew tried to abort the descent less than two seconds
before it hit a seawall on the landing approach to the airport, bounced
along the tarmac and burst into flames.
It was Lee's first attempt to land a 777 at San Francisco airport,
although he had flown there 29 times previously on other types of
aircraft, said South Korean Transport Ministry official Choi Seung-youn.
Earlier, the ministry said Lee, who is in his mid-40s, had almost
10,000 flying hours.
Two teenage Chinese girls on their way to summer camp in the United
States were killed and more than 180 people injured in the crash, the
first fatal accident involving the Boeing 777 since it entered service
in 1995.
The Asiana flight from Seoul to San Francisco, with 16 crew and 291
passengers, included several large groups of Chinese students.
Asiana said Lee Kang-kuk, whose anglicised name was released for the
first time on Monday and differed slightly from earlier usage, was in
the pilot seat during the landing. It was not clear whether the senior
pilot, Lee Jung-min, who had clocked up 3,220 hours on a Boeing 777, had
tried to take over to abort the landing.
"It's a training that is common in the global aviation industry. All
responsibilities lie with the instructor captain," Yoon Young-doo, the
president and CEO of the airline, said at a news conference on Monday at
the company headquarters.
The plane crashed after the crew tried to abort the landing with
less than two seconds to go, according to the U.S. National
Transportation Safety Board said.
NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said information collected from the
plane's cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder indicated there
were no signs of problems until seven seconds before impact, when the
crew tried to accelerate.
A stall warning, in which the cockpit controls begin to shake,
activated four seconds before impact, and the crew tried to abort the
landing and initiate what is known as a "go around" manoeuvre 1.5
seconds before crashing, Hersman said.
She said the plane was "well below" the target air speed of 137
knots (157 miles per hour or 253 kph). "It wasn't just give or take a
few knots," she told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show on Monday. "They were
very slow in this critical phase of flight."
TRAGIC TWIST
In a tragic twist, the San Francisco Fire Department said one of the
Chinese teenagers may have been run over by an emergency vehicle as
first responders reached the scene.
"One of the deceased did have injuries consistent with those of
having been run over by a vehicle," fire department spokeswoman Mindy
Talmadge said.
The two dead girls, Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, were friends from
the Jiangshan Middle School in Quzhou, in the prosperous eastern coastal
province of Zhejiang.
They were among a group of 30 students and five teachers from the
school on their way to attend a summer camp in the United States, the
official Xinhua news agency said.
Ye, 16, had an easy smile, was an active member of the student
council and had a passion for biology, the Beijing News reported.
"Responsible, attentive, pretty, intelligent," were the words written about her on a recent school report, it said.
Wang, a year older than Ye, also was known as a good student and was
head of her class, the newspaper said. The last post on Weibo, China's
Twitter-like microblogging site, simply read in English; "go."
Twelve parents, including those of Ye and Wang, were due to leave
China for San Francisco on Monday, Xinhua reported. The other students
in Ye and Wang's group who are well enough to travel will return to
China as the rest of their trip has now been cancelled, the People's
Daily said on its official microblog.
More than 30 people remained hospitalized late on Sunday. Eight were
listed in critical condition, including two with paralysis from spinal
injuries, hospital officials said.
The charred aircraft remained on the airport tarmac as flight
operations gradually returned to normal. Three of the four runways were
operating by Sunday afternoon.
Hersman said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the
crash. The data recorders corroborated witness accounts and an amateur
video, shown by CNN, indicating the plane came in too low, lifted its
nose in an attempt to gain altitude, and then bounced violently along
the tarmac after the rear of the aircraft clipped a seawall at the
approach to the runway.
Asiana said mechanical failure did not appear to be a factor.
Hersman confirmed that a part of the airport's instrument-landing system
was offline on Saturday as part of a scheduled runway construction
project, but cautioned against drawing conclusions from that.
"You do not need instruments to get into the airport," she said,
noting that the weather was good at the time of the crash and the plane
had been cleared for a visual approach.
SERIOUS INTERIOR DAMAGE
The flight's passengers included 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans, 64
Americans, three Indians, three Canadians, one French, one Vietnamese
and one Japanese citizen.
Pictures taken by survivors showed passengers hurrying out of the
wrecked plane, some on evacuation slides. Thick smoke billowed from the
fuselage and TV footage showed the aircraft gutted by fire. Much of its
roof was gone.
Interior damage to the plane was extreme, Hersman said on CNN earlier on Sunday.
The NTSB released photos showing the wrecked interior cabin with oxygen masks dangling from the ceiling.
Hersman said the first emergency workers to arrive at the scene
included 23 people in nine vehicles. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said a
total of 225 first-responders were involved.
"As chaotic as the site was yesterday, I think a number of miracles
occurred to save many more lives," Lee said at the airport news
conference. Appearing later at San Francisco General Hospital, he
declined to address whether one of the Chinese teenagers may have been
run over.
It was the first fatal commercial airline accident in the United
States since a regional plane operated by Colgan Air crashed in New York
in 2009.
Asiana, South Korea's junior carrier, has had two other fatal crashes in its 25-year history.
(Additional reporting by Gerry Shih, Alistain Barr, Sarah McBride,
Ronnie Cohen, Poornima Gupta, Laila Kearney, Dan Levine, Jonathan Weber,
Peter Henderson, Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles, Jonathan Allen and
Barbara Goldberg in New York, Ben Blanchard in Beijing and Laura
MacInnis in Washington; Editing by David Chance, Raju Gopalakrishnan and
Bill Trott
with the bank teller to the Audition venue: if you in Port harcourt
and environs call:08068500809, Benin and Lagos environs call
07063756588 for more info
