July 07--The Boeing 777 that crashed while trying to land at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday is a workhorse of the airline industry that has enjoyed a stellar reputation among pilots for safety.
"It could very easily have the safest record for that size of aircraft," said Robert Herbst, a retired American Airlines 767 pilot and aviation industry consultant in South Carolina.
The Boeing 777 was pressed into service in 1995 and had not been involved in a fatal crash until the incident Saturday, according to AirSafe.com, which tracks crashes and airline industry safety.
The last serious incident involving a 777 occurred on Jan. 17, 2008, when a British Airways 777 arriving from Beijing touched down about 1,000 feet short of a runway at London's Heathrow Airport, skidded more than 1,000 feet and sheared off its landing gear, according to AirSafe.com.
Investigators later determined that the crash was caused by ice that had formed in the plane's fuel system.
The images of Saturday's Boeing 777 wreckage suggested a simple explanation of what caused the Asiana Airlines 777 to crash as it tried to touch down at SFO's Runway 28L, Herbst said.
It's "very obvious what happened," said Herbst, who flew commercial airliners for 41 years before retiring three years ago. "They landed short of the runway. They were too low for the flight path and the tail of the
aircraft hit the sea wall."
When approaching SFO, Herbst said, "the nose is pretty high up in the air just before touch down. They weren't high enough and the tail hit the sea wall. This is a no-brainer."
Jet fuel in the wings of the 777 then likely caught fire, Herbst said.
The 777 was operated by Asiana Airlines, South Korea's second-largest airline, behind Korean Air.
Asiana Airlines tweeted out two messages Saturday following the crash.
"Thank you for your concern and support at this time," Asiana wrote in the first tweet. "We are currently investigating and will update with news as soon as possible."
A minute later, a second tweet added: "Our thoughts and prayers are with all the passengers and flight crew on the flight."
Asiana Airlines flies Boeing's twin-engine B777-200ER model, which can carry up to 300 passengers, according to the company's website. The airline says it can fly the 777-200ER for 14 hours non-stop between Seoul and Honolulu or between Seattle and Europe.
The last big crash involving a major U.S. airline occurred on Nov. 12, 2001, when an American Airlines Airbus A300-605R taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport and bound for the Dominican Republic crashed into a residential area of Belle Harbor, N.Y., just two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The crash was blamed on pilot error.The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of the crash was the in-flight separation of the vertical stabilizer "created by the first officer's unnecessary and excessive rudder pedal inputs."
All 260 people on board and five people on the ground were killed.
Smaller airlines have had crashes since.
The last fatal commercial U.S. airplane crash was a Continental Express flight operated by Colgan Air, which crashed into a house near Buffalo, N.Y., on Feb. 12, 2009. All 49 people on the flight and a man in a house were killed.
Contact Dan Nakaso at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/dannakaso.
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