The National Transportation Safety Board has rescheduled a hearing about the fatal crash-landing of an Asiana jet that took place earlier this year at the international airport in San Francisco, California.
The aviation accident resulted in three deaths. The safety board is looking specifically at whether the pilots had relied too heavily on computer equipment, causing them not to notice in time when the aircraft began approaching the airport at too low of an altitude, eventually leading the plane to crash into a seawall and tumble across the runway.
A total of 150 people were injured during the course of the plane crash. One of the fatalities was found to have been the result of the victim being run over by a fire truck responding to the crash.
There is a lot to say about this aviation accident from a negligence perspective, since it is clear that a lot went wrong that could have been prevented if pilots, the airline, and airport personnel had done things differently. The main focus on the NTSB investigation and the upcoming hearing with be to figure out the extent of the negligence and what sort of interventions can be used in the future to prevent this type of tragedy from happening again.
In this case there have been some questions for the airline, since the pilot on this flight was landing a Boeing 777 for the first time and had only completed half of his training program. He was accompanied by a flight instructor but investigators say that neither noticed the dangerous rate at which they were approaching the runway until it was too late.
Source: CBS 8, “NTSB hearing on SF airliner crash postponed,” Dec. 10, 2013.
