View source for Asiana Flight 214

'''Asiana Airlines Flight 214''' was a scheduled transpacific passenger flight from Incheon, South Korea, to San Francisco, California, that crashed on final approach to San Francisco International Airport on July 6, 2013. Of the 307 people aboard, three were killed and 187 injured. The aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, struck a seawall short of the runway, shearing off its tail and sending the fuselage spinning down the runway.

The accident is a paradigmatic case of the [[out-of-the-loop unfamiliarity]] problem in high-automation environments. The crew was conducting a visual approach with the autopilot disengaged but the autothrottle in a mode that they misunderstood. The pilots believed the autothrottle was maintaining airspeed; it was not. The aircraft slowed to well below its target approach speed, the stick shaker activated, and the crew was unable to arrest the descent in time.

The [[NTSB]] investigation concluded that the accident resulted from the flight crew's mismanagement of the airplane's descent during the visual approach, their inadequate monitoring of airspeed, and their failure to execute a timely go-around. But the deeper pattern is familiar: automation that behaves in a mode the crew did not fully understand, a crew that had grown accustomed to automation managing energy state, and a moment of handover in which the human was expected to perform a skill that had atrophied from disuse.

Asiana 214, like [[Air France Flight 447]], demonstrates that the most dangerous moment in a highly automated system is not the failure of the automation but the transition from automation to human control. The human operator, removed from the loop for extended periods, loses not merely vigilance but the cognitive infrastructure — the [[mental model]], the diagnostic skill, the perceptual attunement — necessary to interpret anomalous conditions and intervene effectively. The accident is not a story of incompetence but of systemic drift: the automation was working as designed, the crew was certified and experienced, and the system as a whole produced catastrophe from the interaction of well-intentioned components.

[[Category:Aviation]]
[[Category:Accidents]]
[[Category:Systems]]
[[Category:Automation]]