Dee Finney's blog July 6, 2013 PLANE CRASH AT SAN FRANCISCO, CA

5-3-13 - NAP DREAM - I was with some people in the country and I saw this huge long fish come up and fly in the air like an airplane over the trees. It's fins and scales were glinting in the sun with rainbow colors.

We were going to jump into our car and follow it to see where it was going and then the fish began to come down lower and lower and I cried out, "Oh no! It's flying too low!"

I began to think of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme about going up the hill to fetch a pail of water and tumbling down the hill, as the fish began descending too low... but I woke up before it crashed.

Joe reminded me that Pisces is the 'fish' sign, and Aquarius is the 'air' sign. We are moving into that age right now.

NOTE: The nursery rhyme is about King Louis XVI of France in 1793 and the French Revolution and Queen Antoinette who were beheaded and the heads shown to the public when they lost their crown.

I also looked up 'flying fish' and found that a 'flying fish' is the exact proportion a plane should take to stay in the air the best.

I also found that Boeing has built a Hydrogen fueled plane called the Phantom Eye, which is an unmanned drone. It first flew in July of 2010. It can stay in the air for 4 days at 65,000 ft. without refueling. It can carry a payload of 450 lbs. It has a wingspan of 150 ft. and uses liquid hydrogen for fuel.

This is the second plane crash dream I've had in two days. The other one was about going off the end of the runway because of bad brakes.

Asiana Airlines Plane Crashes At San Francisco International Airport

SAN FRANCISCO — An Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul, South Korea, crashed while landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday, critically injuring at least 10 people and forcing passengers to jump down the emergency inflatable slides to safety.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Flight 214 crashed while landing at 11:36 a.m. PDT. A video clip posted to YouTube showed smoke coming from a jet on the tarmac. Passengers could be seen jumping down the emergency slides.

Television footage showed the top of the fuselage was burned away and the entire tail was gone. One engine appeared to have broken away. Pieces of the tail were strewn about the runway. Emergency responders could be seen walking inside the burned-out wreckage.

It wasn't immediately clear what happened to the plane as it was landing, but some eyewitnesses described the aircraft doing a cartwheel and other said that it appeared to sway back and forth kicking up dust. Many said the tail fell off.

Stephanie Turner saw the plane going down and the rescue slides deploy, but returned to her hotel room before seeing any passengers get off the jet, she told ABC News. Turner said when she first saw the flight she noticed right away that the angle of its approach seemed strange.

"It didn't manage to straighten out before hitting the runway," she said. "So the tail of the plane hit the runway, and it cartwheeled and spun and the tail broke off ... I mean we were sure that we had just seen a lot of people die. It was awful.

"And it looked like the plane had completely broken apart," she said. "There were flames and smoke just billowing."

Kate Belding was out jogging just before 11:30 a.m. on a path the water from the airport when she noticed the plane approaching the runway in a way that "just didn't look like it was coming in quite right."

"Then all of a sudden I saw what looked like a cloud of dirt puffing up and then there was a big bang and it kind of looked like the plane maybe bounced (as it neared the ground)," she said. "I couldn't really tell what happened, but you saw the wings going up and (in) a weird angle."

"Not like it was cartwheeling," she said, but rather as though the wings were almost swaying from side to side.

Doug Yakel, a spokesman for the airport, said he did not yet know how many passengers were aboard the flight. "We also don't have any information at this time to the status of those passengers," he said at a brief news conference.

San Francisco General Hospital spokeswoman Rachael Kagan says the adult patients range in age from 20 to their 40s. It was not immediately clear the ages of the children.

San Francisco-area broadcasters KNTV, KCBS and KTVU have reported that there were fatalities in Saturday's crash of the Asiana airlines flight from Seoul, South Korea. But The Associated Press contacted police, fire and coroner's officials and was unable to confirm any deaths.

A call to the airline seeking comment wasn't immediately returned.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team of investigators to San Francisco to probe the crash. NTSB spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said Saturday that NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman would head the team.

Boeing said it was preparing to provide technical assistance to the NTSB.

Numerous flights headed to San Francisco were diverted to other airports. A United Airlines flight bound for San Francisco was sent to Los Angeles airport, and passengers were told the San Francisco airport would be closed for at least three hours Saturday afternoon.

Asiana is a South Korean airline, second in size to national carrier Korean Air. It has recently tried to expand its presence in the United States, and joined the Star Alliance, which is anchored in the U.S. by United Airlines.

The 777-200 is a long-range plane from Boeing. The twin-engine aircraft is one of the world's most popular long-distance planes, often used for flights of 12 hours or more, from one continent to another. The airline's website says its 777s can carry between 246 to 300 passengers.

The flight was 10 hours and 23 minutes, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. The aircraft is configured to seat 295 passengers, it said.

The Boeing 777 is a smaller, wide-body jet that can travel long distances without refueling and is typically used for long flights over water.

The most notable accident involving a 777 occurred on Jan. 17, 2008 at Heathrow Airport in London. British Airways Flight 28 landed hard about 1,000 feet short of the runway and slid onto the start of the runway. The impact broke the 777-200's landing gear. There were 47 injuries, but no fatalities.

An investigation revealed ice pellets that had formed in the fuel were clogging the fuel-oil heat exchanger, blocking fuel from reaching the plane's engines. The Rolls-Royce Trent 800 series engines that were used on the plane were then redesigned.

Bill Waldock, an expert on aviation accident investigation, said he was reminded of the Heathrow accident as he watched video of Saturday's crash. "Of course, there is no indication directly that's what happened here," he said. "That's what the investigation is going to have to find out."

The Asiana 777 "was right at the landing phase and for whatever reason the landing went wrong," said Waldock, director of the Embry-Riddle University accident investigation laboratory in Prescott, Ariz. "For whatever reason, they appeared to go low on approach and then the airplane pitched up suddenly to an extreme attitude, which could have been the pilots trying to keep it out of the ground."

The last time a large U.S. airline lost a plane in a fatal crash was an American Airlines Airbus A300 taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York in 2001.

Smaller airlines have had crashes since then. The last fatal U.S. crash was a Continental Express flight operated by Colgan Air, which crashed into a house near Buffalo, N.Y. on Feb. 12, 2009. The crash killed all 49 people on board and one man in a house.

Flying remains one of the safest forms of transportation: There are about two deaths worldwide for every 100 million passengers on commercial flights, according to an Associated Press analysis of government accident data.

Just a decade ago, passengers were 10 times as likely to die when flying on an American plane. The risk of death was even greater during the start of the jet age, with 1,696 people dying – 133 out of every 100 million passengers – from 1962 to 1971. The figures exclude acts of terrorism.

But airline crashes remain in the public's memory much longer than a wreck on the side of the road. Flying isn't natural and crashes involve many fatalities, often accompanied with horrifying images.

Those in the airline industry often say that you are more likely to die driving to the airport than on your flight. There are more than 30,000 motor-vehicle deaths each year, a mortality rate eight times greater than that in planes.

There are still some corners of the world where flying is risky. Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia have particularly high rates of deadly crashes. But America, Europe and Asia – with the exception of a few low-cost carriers – have remained very safe.

Asia remains one of the fastest-growing regions for aviation in the world. Even with slowing economies in Japan and China, airlines there saw 3.7 percent more passengers than a year ago, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Finding enough experienced pilots to meet a growing number of flights is becoming a problem.

A 2012 report by aircraft manufacturer Boeing said the industry would need 460,000 new commercial airline pilots in the next two decades – with 185,000 of them needed in Asia alone.

"The Asia-Pacific region continues to present the largest projected growth in pilot demand," the report said.

___

Associated Press writers Joan Lowy in Washington, D.C., and Scott Mayerowitz in New York contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO An Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul, South Korea, with more than 300 people aboard crashed while landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday, littering the runway with debris, and forcing passengers to jump down the emergency inflatable slides to safety.

San Francisco Fire Department told CBS News that two people were killed. At least 73 people have been taken to area hospitals for injuries, some critically.

San Francisco General said they have received 10 of the critically injured, including two children.

A spokesperson for San Francisco General said most, if not all, of the passengers taken to the hospital are Korean-speaking. We are working to get interpreters for them," she said, "but they are quite critically injured so there is not a lot of discussion with them at this time."

Early reports indicate that Asiana Airlines Flight 214 made a hard landing, with the tail of the plane striking the runway and breaking off.

"The plane started coming in at an odd angle, there was a huge bang and you could see the cloud of huge black smoke," Kate Belding, who was jogging near the airport at the time of the crash, told KPIX.

"It was a horrible thud," said Kelly Thompson, who observed the crash a hotel parking lot at the airport. She said the plane bounced, then slid on the runway.

Rescue vehicles were on the scene immediately afterwards, with fire trucks spraying a white fire retardant on the wreckage.

Spokesperson Lt. Cdr. Shawn Lansing told CBS News that the U.S. Coast Guard flew two people with burns from the triage center via helicopter to Stanford University Hospital. The severity of the burns is unknown.

The airport was closed for several hours, with flights diverted to Oakland, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Jose and Seattle. At about 3:30 p.m. PT, the airport announced that two runways have reopened.

Arnold Barnett, an aviation expert at MIT, told KCBS it was possible the plane could have experienced a power shortage that caused the pilot to lose control. He said a similar incident occurred involving a Boeing 777 at London's Heathrow Airport in 2008.

David Eun, a Samsung executive who was on board the plane, posted a photo online showing passengers leaving the wreckage.

Posted: 07/07/2013 1:00 pm EDT | Updated: 07/07/2013 2:43 pm EDT

The investigation into the horrific crash at San Francisco airport is looking into a potential pilot error that may have caused the incident.

The CEO of Asiana Airlines said that the company had ruled out a mechanical error on Sunday, and a federal safety official acknowledged that the plane had state-of-the-art technology.

"It's also about the pilots' recognition of the circumstances and what's going on, and so for them to be able to assess what's happening and make the right inputs to make sure they're in a safe situation," National Transportation Safety Board chair Deborah Hersman said on CNN's State Of The Union on Sunday. "That's what we expect from pilots. We want to understand what happened in this situation."

Hersman said it was too early to draw conclusions, but that the pilot of the ill-fated plane would be interviewed.

"It’s really very early in the investigation, she said on ABC's This Week. "We just arrived on scene a few hours ago. We have a lot of work ahead of us. We have teams that will be looking at aircraft operations, at human performance, survival factors, and we’ll be looking at the aircraft. We’ll be looking at power plants, systems and structures. And so we really want to make sure we have a good understanding of the facts before we reach any conclusions."

The Asiana Airlines flight crashed at San Francisco's airport on Saturday killed two people and injured nearly 200.

Reuters | Posted: 07/07/2013 1:31 am EDT

SAN F RANCISCO RUNWAY

* Glide Path calculates descent path for pilots

* Designed for bad weather - sunny when plane crashed

* System not essential, but investigators will check

By Peter Henderson and Dan Levine

SAN FRANCISCO, July 6 (Reuters) - A navigation system that helps pilots make safe descents was turned off at San Francisco airport on Saturday when a South Korean airliner crashed and burned after undershooting the runway, officials said.

The system, called Glide Path, is meant to help planes land in bad weather. It was clear and sunny, with light winds, when Asiana Flight 214 from Seoul, South Korea crashed just before noon, killing two passengers and injuring more than 100.

Aircraft safety experts said Glide Path was far from essential for routine landings, and it was not unusual for airports to take such landing systems off line for maintenance or other reasons.

But pilots have grown to rely on the decades-old technology, which is designed specifically to prevent runway misses, so investigators are likely to look closely at the issue.

"The pilots would have had to rely solely on visual cues to fly the proper glide path to the runway, and not have had available to them the electronic information that they typically have even in good weather at most major airports," said Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the former US Airways pilot who gained fame with a successful crash landing on the Hudson River in 2009.

"What that means is that then the automatic warnings that would occur in the cockpit when you deviate below the desired electronic path wouldn't have been available either. So we don't know yet if that's a factor in this particular situation, but that's certainly something they'll be looking at," he told the local CBS News affiliate.

Glide Path is a computerized system based at an airport that calculates a plane's path of descent and sends it to pilots in real time.

San Francisco International has turned off the system for nearly the entire summer on the runway where the Asiana flight crashed, according to a notice from the airport on the Federal Aviation Administration's Web site. It showed the system out of service June 1-August 22 on runway 28 Left.

Kevin Hiatt, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation and a former Delta pilot, said it was common for airports to take instrument landing systems offline for maintenance on clear days. Pilots use several other instruments and visual cues to land in clear conditions, Hiatt said.

"All of those are more than adequate to fly an aircraft down for a successful landing on the runway," he said.

Sullenberger said the San Francisco runway safety area had been increased to avoid short landings.

Airport spokesman Doug Yakel told reporters there had been construction on the runway recently, but not on Saturday.

"Given that we had clear visibility today, we were operating under what's called visual flight rules," when good weather allows a pilot to see well to operate the plane, he added. He did not take further questions on the instrument landing technology.

Former Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Transportation Mary Schiavo said pilots had become increasingly dependent on instruments for flying. But she added that modern planes had plenty of systems for landing safely, down to a pilot watching the lights on the runway.

Asiana Airlines Flight 214 Crew Tried To Abort Landing Seconds Before Impact: NTSB

7-7-13

By JASON DEAREN and JOAN LOWY, The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Pilots of Asiana Flight 214 were flying too slowly as they approached San Francisco airport, triggering a warning that the jetliner could stall, and then tried to abort the landing seconds before crashing, according to federal safety officials.

The Boeing 777 was traveling at speeds well below the target landing speed of 137 knots, or 157 mph, said National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah Hersman at a briefing Sunday on the crash.

"We're not talking about a few knots," she said, though investigators did not speculate about why it was flying slowly.

Hersman said the aircraft's stick shaker - a piece of safety equipment that warns pilots of an impending stall - went off moments before the crash. The normal response to a stall warning is to increase speed to recover control.

There was an increase several seconds before the crash, she said, basing her comments on an evaluation of the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that contain hundreds of different types of information on what happened to the plane.

And at 1.5 seconds before impact, there was a call for an aborted landing, she said. The crash at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday killed two 16-year-old girls from China and injured dozens of others.

The new details helped shed light on the final moments of the airliner as the crew tried desperately to climb back into the sky, and confirmed what survivors and other witnesses said they saw: a slow-moving airliner.

Pilots normally try to land at the target speed, in this case 137 knots, plus an additional five more knots, said Bob Coffman, an American Airlines captain who has flown 777s. He said the briefing raises an important question: "Why was the plane going so slow?"

The plane's Pratt & Whitney engines were on idle, Hersman said. The normal procedure in the Boeing 777, a wide-body jet, would be to use the autopilot and the throttle to provide power to the engine all the way through to landing, Coffman said.

There was no indication in the discussions between the pilots and the air traffic controllers that there were problems with the aircraft.

Among the questions investigators are trying to answer was what, if any, role the deactivation of a ground-based landing guidance system played in the crash. Such systems help pilots land, especially at airports like San Francisco where fog can make landing challenging.

Altogether, 305 of the 307 people aboard made it out alive in what survivors and rescuers described as nothing less than astonishing after a frightful scene of fire burning inside the fuselage, pieces of the aircraft scattered across the runway and people fleeing for their lives.

The flight originated in Shanghai, China, stopped over in Seoul, South Korea, before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco. The South Korea-based airline said four South Korean pilots were on board, three of whom were described as "skilled."

Among the travelers were citizens of China, South Korean, the United States, Canada, India, Japan, Vietnam and France. There were at least 70 Chinese students and teachers heading to summer camps, according to Chinese authorities.

As the plane approached the runway under clear skies - a luxury at an airport and city known for intense fog - people in nearby communities could see the aircraft was flying low and swaying erratically from side to side.

On board, Fei Xiong, from China, was traveling to California so she could take her 8-year-old son to Disneyland. The pair was sitting in the back half of the plane. Xiong said her son sensed something was wrong.

"My son told me: `The plane will fall down, it's too close to the sea,'" she said. "I told him: `Baby, it's OK, we'll be fine.'"

On audio recordings from the air traffic tower, controllers told all pilots in other planes to stay put after the crash. "All runways are closed. Airport is closed. San Francisco tower," said one controller.

At one point, the pilot of a United Airlines plane radioed.

"We see people ... that need immediate attention," the pilot said. "They are alive and walking around."

"Think you said people are just walking outside the airplane right now?" the controller replied.

"Yes," answered the pilot of United Flight 885. "Some people, it looks like, are struggling."

When the plane hit the ground, oxygen masks dropped down, said Xu Da, a product manager at an Internet company in Hangzhou, China, who was sitting with his wife and teenage son near the back of the plane.

When he stood up, he said he could see sparking - perhaps from exposed electrical wires.

He turned and could see the tail where the galley was torn away, leaving a gaping hole through which they could see the runway. Once on the tarmac, they watched the plane catch fire, and firefighters hose it down.

"I just feel lucky," said Xu, whose family suffered some cuts and have neck and back pain.

In the chaotic moments after the landing, when baggage was tumbling from the overhead bins onto passengers and people all around her were screaming, Wen Zhang grabbed her 4-year-old son, who hit the seat in front of him and broke his leg.

Spotting a hole at the back of the jumbo jet where the bathroom had been, she carried her boy to safety.

"I had no time to be scared," she said.

At the wreckage, police officers were throwing utility knives up to crew members inside the burning wreckage so they could cut away passengers' seat belts. Passengers jumped down emergency slides, escaping from billowing smoke that rose high above the bay.

Nearby, people who escaped were dousing themselves with water from the bay, possibly to cool burn injuries, authorities said.

By the time the flames were out, much of the top of the fuselage had burned away. Inside The tail section was gone, with pieces of it scattered across the beginning of the runway. One engine was gone, and the other was no longer on the wing.

San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes-White said the two 16-year-old girls from China who died were found on either side of the plane. Investigators are trying to determine whether they were alive or dead when rescuers reached the scene.

"What we saw yesterday, most people will never see in their career," Hayes-White said.

Lowy reported from Washington, D.C. Associated Press writers Terry Collins, Terry Chea and Sudhin Thanawala in San Francisco, David Koenig in Dallas and Louise Watt in Beijing contributed to this report.

Asiana Airlines Plane Crashes At San Francisco International Airport

San Francisco Crash Investigation Looking Into Possible Pilot Error

SFO Landing System, Glide Path, Off On Runway At Time Of Asiana Airlines Crash

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