Six key bodies will investigate Saturday’s crash of an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 at San Francisco International Airport.
Lead body will be the US crash investigator the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and it will be assisted by the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, engine-maker Pratt & Whitney, Asiana Airlines and Korea’s Aviation and Railway Accidents Investigation Board.At an NTSB press conference the agency said that “everything is on the table,” meaning all agencies involved in the investigation will be looking at every possible aspect of the accident and every “probable cause” scenario from mechanical failure to human factors.
It then becomes a process of elimination, with each respective agency released when findings eliminate their area of interest.
For example, if it is determined that the engines were performing perfectly and are not a factor, then Pratt & Whitney will end their involvement.
Critical to the investigation are two pieces of mechanical equipment that did survive this crash intact. First is the DFDR, or Digital Flight Data Recorder – the proverbial “black box” (even though it is actually painted bright red-orange). This device records hundreds of parameters of data, and gives detailed evidence of control surface inputs and movement, power settings, and all changes in attitude, airspeed, and altitude. It provides a detailed three-dimensional “road map” of every second of the flight up to the moment of impact and until the aircraft comes to rest.
The second device is the CVR, or Cockpit Voice Recorder, which captures the final 30 minutes of conversation between the pilots onboard the airliner, as well as all Air Traffic Control personnel who communicated with the aircraft.
Additional valuable information is provided by listening to, and analyzing various sounds inside the cockpit, such as warning horns, and even the sequence of specific switches being activated on various control panels.
All that is known so far is that the Asiana Boeing 777-22ER experienced an abnormally high sink rate prior to striking the sea wall at the approach end of runway 28 Left.
Now it’s up to the experts to determine why.
