Federal crash investigators revealed Wednesday that the pilot flying Asiana Airlines Flight 214 told them that he was temporarily blinded by a bright light when 500 feet above the ground.I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and guess that when the airplane was at 500' AGL, that it was already too low and too slow.
But let's skip past that for a minute and look at the "blinded by the light" statement.
Runway 28L at KSFO has a true bearing of 297 degrees (or, if you like the old compass points, that's between west-northwest and northwest by west). The airplane was in final, so that's the direction that the pilots would be looking. The Sun was behind them, local apparent noon was almost two hours later.
There were at least three pilots in that cockpit. My suspicion is that the path to smack the seawall at KSFO was apparent long before this mysterious blinding light.
I'm not saying that there wasn't a light. But you can color me "very skeptical" of that story.
10 comments:
A local pilot expressed bafflement. The day was clear and sunny with only a slight wind. There are no obstacles on the approach over the water. Anybody who couldn't land in those conditions has no business flying, "flash of light" or no.
Hmm. Will we hear another excuse next, or will we move directly on to blaming the other guys on the flight deck?
My question would have been when you saw the bring flash at 500ft where were you relative to the outer marker or other known point?
From all I've seen and heard he was damn low and far out at that and the flash might have been the reflective water he was far too close to!
Either that or the red lights of the PAPI....
Eck!
Anybody who couldn't land in those conditions has no business flying, "flash of light" or no.
Boy howdy.
I get the feeling that the Asiana pilots maybe get four minutes of stick time per flight, and all of that on takeoff. A private pilot who flies out for a $100 burger probably gets more stick time on that trip than an Asiana pilot gets in several months.
BWTFDIK.....
Why do you refer to the airport as "KSFO"? To my knowledge, it is SFO. What am I missing.
KSFO is a right wing radio station in San Francisco.
BCFD36
KSFO is the ICAO identifier for SFO. As to the 'problem', they don't hand fly acft very often, and the juniors NEVER question/point out errors in the Korean culture... Just sayin...
Only since Tom Clancy novels seem prescient... we recall one where the two agents take a room in a Japanese hotel and use a laser to blind a landing cockpit crew and they crash.. the notion, at least, is in public circulation. (smh)
Some turd in LA is doing 30 months in a Federal crossbar hotel for lighting up an airplane with a green laser, so it's not all fiction.
Problem is that Asiana 214 was coming in over the water in the middle of a sunny day. Aiming the laser would not be a trivial problem.
at 500' and their rate of descent not even a dozen JATO bottles would've saved 'em...
not even a dozen JATO bottles would've saved 'em...
Yep. That cake was baked and about to be served up.
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