The National Transportation Safety Board released its final conclusions about what caused the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in San Francisco last July, blaming the pilots for making a series of critical missteps related to the Boeing 777’s automated systems.
At a hearing in Washington, D.C., this morning, the NTSB highlighted one mistake in particular for setting up the conditions in the cockpit that led the airliner to lose speed and crash-land short of the runway. Investigators say the relatively inexperienced captain who was flying the visual approach to San Francisco’s Runway 27L, concerned about being too high and too fast when 5 nm from the runway, changed the autopilot mode, inadvertently causing the 777 to start a climb back to the selected go-around altitude of 3,000 feet.
