BP GEOGRAPHIC

The crash landing of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 at San Francisco Airport in July 2013 happened due to some wrong inputs by the pilot flying the plane. He set a wrong autopilot setting which put the plane into a climb, and to counteract that he reduced the throttles to idle. He didn’t know that by doing this chain of inputs the auto throttle wakeup system would be turned off, so the throttles remained at idle and the plane didn’t have enough speed to recover when it flew too low. It then hit the seawall at the beginning of the runway. The rest is well known.

But why did the pilot do such a mistake? First of all, he was on training for transition from an Airbus A320 to the Boeing 777. But most importantly: During his about 10,000 hours as an airline pilot he nearly never flew the airplane by hand! He always depended on the automation.