The San Francisco Crash: Don’t Blame the Pilot

The inexperienced pilot who missed his landing in San Francisco makes for the ideal culprit. He is not at all.

When images surfaced of the Asiana Boeing 777, which became an orange fireball in several minutes after its tail end collided with the San Francisco airport runway, it was said that it was a miracle that there had not been more victims among the 307 passengers and cabin crew members. Two young Chinese passengers died when they were ejected from the plane, and more than 100 passengers were injured, some seriously. However, the construction standards for modern equipment, improvements rendered by emergency exits, increased ease for passengers to remove themselves from their seats, and above all, the expanded training for cabin crew to evacuate the plane in less than two minutes, all mean that this type of accident — “low-profile, survivable,” say the experts — no longer ends in terrible tragedy. This was already proven in 2005 by an Air France Airbus accident to Toronto, and five years ago by a Boeing 777 crash to London, which caused injuries but no victims.

The fact remains that if the plane passed the relative safety test, and if the commercial crew acted faultlessly, everything comes together to reject human error as responsible for the crash, and therefore, logically, the responsibility of the pilot, Lee Kang-guk, 46 — especially since we were quick to learn that this pilot, who has logged 9,700 hours of flying, has been a member of the Asiana team for 19 years and flown as captain on A320s, Boeing 737 and 747s, but was inexperienced in flying Boeing 777s. Admittedly, he had already flown this machine from Seoul, his home airport, to London, Los Angeles and Tokyo, but he had never touched down in San Francisco and only had 43 hours of flying a 777.

Trainer Responsible for the Flight

“None of this is abnormal,” said a French pilot and Boeing 777 trainer, “I have already trained pilots with less flight time on this plane than Mr. Kang-guk.”

The cost of flight hours on modern commercial planes means that pilots who are up to qualify for a new plane train on the ground in a simulator that perfectly recreates reality, rather than control an empty plane as was done in the past. During the first real flights, trainers take the right-hand seat, the co-pilot’s seat, which lets them intervene immediately. “Especially when landing, after the captain it is the trainer who is in charge and not the person sitting in the left-hand seat, even if it is that individual who has control.”

Even if this does not change anything for those who lost their lives or were seriously injured after the San Francisco crash, it is therefore not the inexperience of the captain that was responsible for the accident, but rather distraction or lack of attention or reflexivity on behalf of the trainer. Moreover, the CEO of Asiana has recognized that “it was the trainer, Lee Jeong-min, who was ultimately responsible for the flight and who had 3,220 hours’ flight time on a Boeing 777.”*

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.