greg5

Flashover. The plastic materials comprising the seats, side panels, stow bins, and floor panels inside the aircraft will smolder creating gasses that will collect at the top inside the fuselage and then eventually ignite.

exerda

Thanks for the explanation--makes perfect sense. Those materials are designed to be flame-retardant/resistant, but not flame-proof, to give people time to get out. But under heat they will still degrade, release gases, etc.

lovely15

You can generally still do an IFR approach if only the glideslope is out of service - you still have horizontal guidance from the localizer. Not sure if they were using it or not, but wanted to clarify that part.

greg5

Exactly. All of the materials that go into building the aircraft, and anything that is installed by airlines in the interior of the aircraft go through extensive flammability testing by the manufacturers, and must be approved by the manufacturers and the FAA. However, as you mentioned, the materials are designed and tested to be flame-retardant/resistant, and they will eventually ignite if the fire source is not extinguished first.

hnl808

Do you think OZ will retire the 214 flight number due to this event? In the past other airlines retire a flight number if it is involved in a major accident or fatility.

jspira

More updates and details emerge as the NTSB recovers the black boxes and Asiana's president apologizes.

Asiana Apologizes for Crash, NTSB Recovers Black Boxes

edcho

+ alcohol (from duty free) can be a contributing factor as well (and has been part of the discussion in the past).

Hmm... Hopefully they quickly determine if there were contributing factors (i.e. seat belts not worn, etc). I've seen many times where pax will unbuckle right before landing.

exerda

They operated it today from what some others had posted upthread. Could still retire it in the future, of course.

transportprof

Perhaps I'm over-generalizing, but it appears that SFO management took a calculated risk in taking one layer of aviation safety infrastructure out of service (ILS) during a period of generally fine weather conditions in order to advance preparations for installing another layer of safety infrastructure, an engineered materials arresting system.

If so, that decision doesn't look so wise in 20-20 hindsight.

I wonder whether this calculated risk will be noted as one of the contributing factors in the NTSB accident report?

A_Lee

By 'domestic' I'm assuming you mean USA. I think overall the average American is more aware and concerned about safety. States with laws requiring people to wear seatbelts in cars have been in place for a long time, as well as strict laws for how infants and children are to be fastened in while in a car. Laws in Asia seem to be more lax in general, if they even exist, and they don't have such a long history of such laws either, from what I gather. Certainly many Americans don't wear seatbelts when they should, either in a car or on a plane, but I think that overall, even if they don't wear one themselves, they are concerned about child safety and will see to it that children are buckled in. In Asia, I find it very disconcerting how many time I see children not buckled in, while the parent right next to them seem oblivious to the fact, even though the parent may be buckled in. I mentioned before, I'm not really concerned about an adult, knowing they should be wearing their seatbelts but refuse, and if they are seriously injured or killed as a result of it. That's their prerogative. But when children aren't buckled in, I take it much more seriously. I think US based airlines' FA's are also more likely to check carefully that the children are wearing their seatbelts. Asian carrier FA's seem much more lax to me in that regard.

Perhaps a solution would be some laws with very significant fines for the adults/guardians/supervisors of children if their children are caught not wearing their seatbelts.

Regarding lap infants, I also have the same concerns as you. Although I don't have any ideas that I would consider to be practical to deal with them.

In thinking more about my lack of concern over adults wearing seatbelts, perhaps I'm mistaken. Not out of concern for their own safety, but more out of the likelihood of an unsecured human body becoming a projectile that could seriously injure or kill innocent other passengers. So maybe some huge fines are also needed for those individuals. With the availability of small/lightweight cameras and recording devices, it might be practical to install them above every seat. For any passenger not strapped in when they should be, have the authorities detain those passengers upon landing until the fine is paid and split the fine between any fellow passenger who reports them, the airline, and the government of the legal jurisdiction of the airline's location. That way an incentive for the safety conscious passengers, who want to keep the flights safe for everyone, an incentive for the airlines which helps to defray the costs of installing/maintaining the systems, not to mention hopefully reduced insurance and lawsuit costs, due to fewer injured passengers, and for the governments who need to enforce the law.

Well, perhaps getting a bit off-topic here, being as of yet there's no word how the lack of wearing seatbelts in this case may contributed to deaths and/or injuries. But it's normally at times of disasters that new laws and regulations have the best chance to succeed in being drawn up.

eng3

Doesn't the FAA have regulations for the minimum equipment a runway needs to have operational for safety?
Also, hundreds of other flights, landed with no issue.
Watching air disasters, it's rarely just one failure that causes a crash, its always a mix of several factors.

A_Lee

These days there are some FA's who can speak at least limited Cantonese and/or Mandarin. There was one on my last flight to SFO, and it was really needed given the number of mainland Chinese onboard the flight. The only problem was I think she was the only one, and I could tell she was struggling to communicate everything she wanted to the passengers. It's not all that common for them to be on flights, but they are on at least some.

At present, students studying to be FA's in Korea are strongly encouraged to learn Chinese, due to the large number of flights to China and Chinese aboard the Korea based airlines, and I've heard it's a big plus for FA job candidates, even if they're applying to OZ or KE.

eng3

Don't know about fines. What if someone falls asleep and simply misses the seatbelt signal. It's also hard to see all the belts (ie. blanket, jacket, arms covering).

As for infants, they could require that all infants need to buy a seat. (like in cars). It would just be alot more expensive for the parents.

As for this flight, I'm sure there were a few people without their seatbelts on. I think that statistically, every flight has a couple not wearing seatbelts, just like how every flight has a some people with their cellphones on.

transportprof

I agree that the lack of ILS could be a contributing factor, not a cause. But risk management is all about probabilities. When you turn off one layer of navigational infrastructure, you have changed the risk profile of each landing, even though it is still above the minimum requirements set by FAA.

From what the pilots on this thread have been saying, 777 flight crew only get one or two opportunities to land a plane each month, and doing so by hand is perhaps even less frequent. That strikes me as a significant change in the risk of an accident.

Herb687

???

There have been many accidents which have nothing to do with pilot error: UAL817, UAL232, BAW38 and the Alaska MD-80 off of Pt. Mugu come to mind immediately - the first three involving mechanical failures where lives were saved thanks to heroic airmanship, the latter a mechanical failure that left the pilots with an absolutely uncontrollable airplane, unrecoverable under any conditions.

There are some where it was pure pilot error - see AA's love of plowing off the ends of runways in thunderstorms they have no business landing in (LIT, KIN). Aires at SKSP probably falls in that category. Obviously KAL shooting a perfect VOR approach (non-precision approach? looked pretty precise to me!) to the VOR instead of the runway is one as well!

Then you have the interesting hybrids: i.e. the pilots of the ill-fated AA 757 descending into SKCL certainly could have pointed some of the blame towards buggy programming in the FMS where two navaids hundreds of miles away were represented by the same character in the FMS (and on paper charts) and trying to go direct to one of them initiated a turn to the wrong one - but even there pilot error played a major role in the crash as the pilots had totally lost situational awareness, did not arrest their descent in a known area of very challenging terrain once realizing their confusion and uncertainty and reacted far too late to a the airplane making a turn > 90 degrees off of the planned course.

So, no, it's not "always" pilot error. But at this point in time Asiana 214 sure looks in every way like pilot error.