(CNN) -- Investigators gathered
critical clues in San Francisco on Sunday in hopes of solving the mystery
surrounding the deadly crash landing of Asiana Airlines Flight 214.
Both flight data recorders have been recovered, the National
Transportation Safety Board said, from wreckage left by Saturday's tragedy that
left two 16-year-old passengers dead.
Survivors and witnesses reported the 7-year-old Boeing 777 appeared to
be flying too low as it approached the end of a runway near the bay.
"Stabilized approaches have long been a safety concern for the
aviation community," NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman told CNN on Sunday,
saying they represent a significant threat. "We see a lot of runway
crashes."
"We want to understand what was going on with this crew so we can
learn from it," Hersman said.
Hersman said her team hopes to interview the pilots in the coming days.
Internal damage to the plane is "really striking," she said,
and officials are thankful there weren't more deaths.
San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White agreed. "I was near the
plane and took a look inside," she told reporters Sunday. "It was
nothing short of a miracle that we had literally 123 people walk away from
this."
Another 182 aboard the plane were taken to hospitals with injuries
ranging from spinal fractures to bruises, she said. At San Francisco General
Hospital, 19 survivors remained hospitalized, 6 of them in critical condition,
she said. Conditions of victims at other hospitals was unclear Sunday.
Nothing, including pilot error, has been ruled out as a possible cause
of the crash, investigators said. The recorders have already arrived at an NTSB
lab in Washington for analysis.
Teen girls Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, both Chinese nationals, were
killed in the crash, Asiana Airlines said Sunday. There were 291 passengers and
16 crew members aboard the two-engine jet, which had flown a 10-hour direct
flight from Seoul, South Korea.
"The tail of the Asiana flight hit the runway and the aircraft
veered to the left out of the runway," said Choi Jeong-ho, head of South
Korea's Aviation Policy Bureau.
Airport technology called the Instrument Landing System, or ILS -- which
normally would help pilots correctly approach the runway -- was not operating
at the time, according to a Federal Aviation Administration bulletin.
"There are a lot of systems that help support pilots" as they
fly into busy airports, Hersman said. Some of these systems alert the pilots.
"A lot of this is not necessarily about the plane telling them" that
something may be wrong, she said. "It's also about the pilot's recognition
of the circumstances and what's going on. 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 -- that's what we expect from pilots."
The ILS integrates with the aircraft's cockpit to trigger a audible
warning, consultant and retired 777 pilot Mark Weiss told CNN. "You hear a
mechanical voice that says, 'too low, too low, too low.'" The ILS is
"nice to have," Weiss said, "but it's not critical on the
777." There are redundant systems aboard the aircraft that would provide
similar warnings if the plane was coming in too low, said Weiss, who has landed
777s hundreds of times.
Weiss said he's perplexed by the details surrounding the crash landing.
If the pilot was somehow unaware the plane was coming in too low, Weiss wonders
why another member of the flight crew didn't speak up and warn him.
The pilot operating the aircraft was a veteran who had been flying for
Asiana since 1996, the airline said. Evidence in the investigation will include
data that show what action the pilots took during the approach to the airport.
More clues could be revealed in the next six to eight hours, former managing
director of the NTSB Peter Goelz told CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday. That's how
long Goelz expects it will take analysts "to get a good picture" from
data inside the flight recorders. "It will be a fairly quick
process," Goelz said. "If the plane was coming in too low or too fast
-- at the wrong angle ... by the end of the day the National Transportation
Safety Board will have a fairly good idea what happened."
For investigators in the field, he said, it's important to interview the
pilots "as soon as possible."
"But in an international investigation, it's somewhat of a more
sensitive issue," Goetz acknowledged.
Although temperatures were mild on the runway Saturday, a London crash landing of a British Airways 777 in 2008 raised
suspicions about ice contributing to the San Francisco tragedy.
Investigators believe the UK incident was caused by ice forming in the
fuel system as the plane flew through cold air over Siberia en
route to the UK. Seventeen people were hurt in that crash.
"Even if the landing temperature was 65 degrees (Saturday), if they
were at 10,000 feet shortly before, it potentially could have been a
problem," said Weiss. "But not necessarily. It's something they want
to take a look at."
Hayes-White said Saturday that when crews arrived, "some of the
passengers (were) coming out of the water. But the plane was certainly not in
the water."
Survivors reported hearing no warning from the cockpit before the plane
slammed onto the edge of the runway, severing the plane's tail and sending the
fuselage spinning on its belly. The crash landing blew a fireball and clouds of
smoke into the sky.
Passengers scrambled to exit a crash scene that one survivor described
as "surreal."
On the runway, medics found
the bodies of the two Chinese teens lying next to burning wreckage. Remarkably,
the other 305 people on the plane survived. Passengers included 70 Chinese
students and teachers who were headed to
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