I learned to fly in the San Francisco Bay Area, and, back when traffic was much lighter, flew air taxis in and out of San Francisco International Airport.
The weather on Saturday was absolutely clear, bright sun, light wind. The wind is normally out of the west so landing operations are made on runways 28L and 28R. When the weather is good, pilots will either be cleared for an ILS (Instrument Landing System) approach, or a visual approach. For the latter, there are two sets of lights on either side of the runway, called VASI (for Visual Approach Slope Indicator). These lights shine up at an angle. If you are above the angle they appear white; if you are below the angle, they appear red. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_approach_slope_indicator The idea is to have the lights closer to the approach end of the runway appear white, and the ones farther away appear red. That means your descent angle is between the two and you will touch down between them. With those, you descend by looking at the lights (so you are on the proper descent angle) and your airspeed indicator (so you don’t stall). This is private pilot stuff. The pilot of this particular Boeing 777 had only 44 hours in type. (This includes cruising time, as well as takeoffs and landings.) He came in too slow for some unknown reason and the airplane was about to stall. Finally recognizing this he applied full throttle but the B777 is a ponderous beast and doesn’t respond the way a small airplane would. There was not enough time or altitude to recover. The tail struck the seawall at the approach end of rwy 28L and broke off and the rest was inevitable. I’m surprised he didn’t take out the approach lights while he was at it. Had he coupled his ILS instruments to the rwy 28L ILS the plane would have been brought in automatically and all he would have had to do was to pull back the throttles to land. Airbus aircraft have more systems to help keep the pilot out of trouble; a voice counts down the aititude to the ground (based on a radar altimeter, so it’s actual height above the ground, not height above sea level, although at SFO the two are essentially the same): “Four hundred, three hundred, two hundred, one hundred, fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, retard, retard, retard” – the last being an admonition to the pilot to pull back (retard) the throttles. I don’t know if Boeing aircraft do this – Boeing’s philosophy is different, they give the pilot more freedom/leeway/room to hang himself/etc. I suspect if had been an Airbus the plane would have recognized that he was in a precarious situation and all kinds of warnings would have been going off in the cockpit. This had nothing to do with US vs. metric altitude indications. Carleton From: owner-u...@colostate.edu [mailto:owner-u...@colostate.edu] On Behalf Of Henschel Mark Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 06:31 To: U.S. Metric Association Cc: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:53033] Re: FAA must Metricate korean pilot admit to that i wonder when the faa will go metric part of e.o. 12270 ----- Original Message ----- From: Bruce Arkwright Jr <a-bruie...@lycos.com <mailto:a-bruie...@lycos.com> > Date: Monday, July 8, 2013 12:41 am Subject: [USMA:53031] FAA must Metricate To: "U.S. Metric Association" <usma@colostate.edu <mailto:usma@colostate.edu> > > What if that poor tired Vietnamese pilot, forget he had hit the > convert button, after crossing into our air space, but still > read meters instead of feet as he aproched the landing strip? > Will FAA emit to that? At any rate its time for FAA to get on board! > > > Bruce E. Arkwright, Jr > Erie PA > Linux and Metric User and Enforcer > > > I will only invest in nukes that are 150 gigameters away. How > much solar energy have you collected today? > Id put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of > power! I hope we dont have to wait til oil and coal run out > before we tackle that. I wish I had a few more years left. -- > Thomas Edison♽☯♑ >
