Around Us

The two victims of the Asiana Flight 214 crash in San Francisco were teenage schoolgirls from eastern China, headed to the U.S. for a two-week summer camp

 Our thoughts are with the residents of Lac Megantic and the passengers of the Asiana Airlines flight.

The cockpit voice recorder of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 appears to show the pilots tried to abort the landing less than two seconds before the plane crashed on the runway at San Francisco International Airport, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.

 The plane's voice and flight data recorders show that the flight from South Korea was coming in too slow and too low and that the pilots appear to have increased speed seven seconds before impact, Deborah Hersman said. 

A stall warning sounded four seconds before the crash, and the crew then made an internal decision "to initiate a go-around 1.5 seconds to impact," she said. The NTSB's preliminary assessment of the plane's cockpit and flight data recorders appear to indicate that the flight went from a routine landing to a disaster in a matter of seconds. 

 But when asked if pilot error was to blame, Hersman said the crash landing was still under investigation. "I would discourage anyone from drawing any conclusions at this point," she said, adding that investigators are still working to corroborate the information on the recorders. But what happened inside the cockpit of the Boeing 777 may well be the key factor in Saturday's accident that killed two people, injured 182 and forced the temporary closure of one of the country's largest airports. ~ CNN