Eerily Reminiscent of the Sewol Captain's Order?
Remember Asiana Flight 241? July 6, 2013? The airplane that crash-landed at the San Francisco Airport? According to Brian Ries, "NTSB Blames Pilots in July 2013 Asiana Airlines Crash" (Mashable, July 24, 2014), the pilot gave a strange order:
The NTSB credited the aircraft's flight attendants for initiating the evacuation, overriding the pilot's orders to wait.If true, this is eerily reminiscent of the Sewol captain's order that passengers remain waiting in their cabins. I won't make a cultural critique of this, as if this had to do with something unique about Korean culture. No, I think it's universal code for "We don't know what the f**k we're doing, so don't move till someone arrives who does know."
Fortunately, the flight attendants did know what to do . . .
Labels: Korea
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 6:17 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I've never heard of pilots waiting to evacuate a plane that crashed. There have been several instances of ship captains behaving irresponsibility, notably the Condordia. I think the similar responses of the Korean ferry captain and Asiana pilots are a coincidence.
Sonagi
It is unheard of . . . until now. Assuming the report is true (and I do wonder), this would be not pure coincidence, e.g., a toss of the dice, but coincidence due to comparable incompetence.
Jeffery Hodges
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To be fair, the NTSB also said the pilots were NOT incompetent, but rather sorely lacking in training on the 777 systems. Looking at the wreakage, the pilots would not have been able to immediately see the fuselage damage that the crew saw. With the nose intact and both wings still attached, they may have felt waiting on the rescue response team was the best option. Obviously when the fire broke out evacuation was paramount.
Jay
But "lacking . . . training on the 777 systems" means that they were effectively not competent to fly that plane, so why were they flying it?
You may be right about the pilot's reasoning, but that also sounds like an issue of competence - the first thing to do is to determine if an immediate evacuation is necessary.
Or so it seems to me . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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