“It is Like Setting off at the Traffic Lights in Your Car in Fourth Gear Instead of First”

It's looking more and more like pilot error was the cause of the air crash at San Francisco International Airport, particularly low air speed on approach by a pilot who was training on the Boeing 777:

The captain of the flight that crashed in San Francisco International Airport had relatively little experience piloting Boeing 777s and had clocked up only 43 hours on the model, the airline said on Monday.

"It was Lee Kang-kuk's maiden flight to the airport with the jet," a spokeswoman for Asiana Airlines told Reuters. "He was in training. Even a veteran gets training (for a new jet)."

The plane was also flying “significantly below” its intended speed and its crew tried to stop the landing less than two seconds before it hit a seawall next to the runway, federal aviation inspectors said. 

...

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday that the pilots were flying too slowly as they approached the airport and tried to abort the landing but crashed only a second later.

“Why was the speed low? Don’t think you can speculate on why at this point (but) you shouldn’t be that low on approach to the point where the speed gets to a stick shaker activation,” Gjertsen said, referring to a piece of safety equipment that warns pilots of an impending stall.

“The engines are very big and have a lot of inertia,” he added. “That’s why you don’t want to go too much below your calculated speed.  It is like setting off at the traffic lights in your car in fourth gear instead of first,” he said. “It takes you longer to accelerate if you move off in fourth.”

There was no evidence in the two recovered “black boxes” that the Boeing 777 was experiencing any problems before the crash, National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah Hersman said at a Sunday news conference.

Hersman said investigators were also planning to conduct interviews with the pilots, the crew and passengers in order to reconstruct the events leading up to the dramatic event.

2 female Chinese teenagers perished in the crash, over 180 injured, with many of them suffering serious spinal injuries. 

All of it apparently avoidable.

God's mercy and healing on all impacted.