Pilots of the ill-fated 2013 Asiana Airlines flight that crashed on approach into San Francisco "mismanaged" the landing of the airplane, including inadvertently deactivating the craft's control for airspeed, ruled the National Transportation Safety Board.
The NTSB, though, said Boeing 777's complex autothrottle and auto flight director contributed to the accident, saying that materials provided to Asiana were not clear about a critical portion of autothrottle's operation,
reported The Associated Press.
The airliner came in too loo toward San Francisco International Airport, hitting a seawall and cartwheeling down the runway during its crash last July 6,
reported ABC News. The flight killed two teenagers initially and a third, Ye Meng Yuan, was run over and killed by a rescue vehicle as she lay on the tarmac.
More than 200 others were injured in the crash, the AP reported.
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"In their efforts to compensate for the unreliability of human performance, the designers of automated control systems have unwittingly created opportunities for new error types that can be even more serious than those they were seeking to avoid," Chris Hart, NTSB's acting chairman told the AP, adding that the crew had become so reliant to the automated plane instruments they did not realize anything was amiss until it was too late.
"It's there to help them," Deborah Hersman, the NTSB chairwoman at the time of the accident, told ABC News about the plane's automated systems. "But you can't abdicate the responsibility for actually having good flying skills when you’re in the cockpit."
The New York Times reported that the NTSB made a flurry of recommendations with the Asiana Airlines ruling, including an improved automatic warning system for the planes and better training for the pilots, who were new to the aircraft at the time of the crash.
Boeing, though, pushed back on its alleged role in the accident, saying in a statement that it "respectfully disagrees with the NTSB's statement that the 777's auto-flight system contributed to this accident, a finding that we do not believe is supported by the evidence."
Other
NTSB recommendation included a redesign of the Boeing 777 autoflight system, additional airplane manuals for Asiana crews and improvement in emergency communications at San Francisco International Airport.
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