[cpncrunch]

It looks like this was an unstabilized approach right down to the ground. It would be interesting to see what the company SOP is. Any safe airline has a no-fault go-around policy for unstabilized approaches, and you'll actually get in trouble if you continue with an unstabilized approach and you don't go around. From what pilots are saying on the message boards it seems that a lot of Asian airlines have pretty much the opposite policy - you get in trouble if you go around for any reason, and they would prefer you to salvage an unstabilized approach to save money.

[VladRussian2]

pretty much looks the same to me - the guy stalled and when he finally, at the last second (actually - well past the last second), decided to go around, he did jerk up the nose and that increased the stall, so they fell. Reminds me about the AirFrance fall in the Atlantic some years ago - that guy was trying to gain altitude by jerking the nose up (i.e. increasing the "angle of attack") instead of "pressing the accelerator pedal".

[marvin]

If this is what really happened, I'll say the same thing I said then - it shocks me that airline pilots with thousands of flight hours can make the most elementary piloting mistake possible.

But I've read accident reports before, and it's rarely a good idea to speculate. I won't have an opinion about this until the official report is published.

[cpncrunch]

Pilots are human, and they make mistakes. Good training, having two pilots on the flightdeck and having good SOPs should prevent anything like this ever happening. It looks like training and/or SOPs were severely lacking here.

As well as the "don't waste our company money doing a go-around" fuckwitted notion, people are saying that Asian airlines don't like doing visual approaches period. Therefore whenever the pilot is required to do a visual approach, he/she will be severely lacking in the skills to do it.

[VladRussian2]

well, until report is out, we're here to speculate (or to read a good speculation if we're lucky :). From the Flightaware data the plane had 109kts at 100feet altitude before the seawall. The stall speed of 777 is about 110kts (its Vat is ~140, and it is 1.3 of the stall). And the speed was falling as the next recording is 85kts. While we can only guess about the original cause - pilot error or hardware, etc... - the stall seems to be there.

[marvin]

Are you sure that the Flightaware data is accurate enough? When flying a glider, I have attempted to make similar judegments from GPS log data when doing an outlanding, and I'd be similarly careful when using radar data from a website.

I don't want to be very negative here, but my point is I've made wrong calls about this when speculating in the past. So currently I'm opposed to doing it for reasons other than entertainment.

[VladRussian2]

> for reasons other than entertainment.

well, i'd be surprised if there are people here for any other reasons :)

the flightaware data correlates very well with what is on video. Personally i spent a bunch of time on Coyote Pt. so i can mentally correlate the video with how it looks for other planes/landings at SFO. As we aren't ordained NTSB officers, we're free to make wrong calls :)