Probe of Guam Crash Adds Weight to Pilot Error Theory

AGANA, Guam —  The likelihood that pilot error was a major factor in Wednesday’s crash of Korean Air Flight 801 grew stronger today as teams of experts stepped up their investigation of the accident that claimed at least 225 lives.

National Transportation Safety Board officials said there is no evidence that anything was wrong with the Boeing 747, or with the navigational equipment being used to guide the jumbo jet as it prepared to land at the airport here after a flight from Seoul.

Although it was raining, meteorological experts say the weather should have presented no unusual problems for the Korean flight crew. There is no evidence of mishandling of the flight by air traffic controllers, and the controllers say the plane’s initial approach to the landing pattern appeared to have been normal.

“We have no indication that the crew was reporting anything wrong,” chief NTSB investigator Greg Feith said Friday night after lab technicians in Washington listened to tapes from the cockpit voice recorder recovered from the wreckage.

Feith said that readouts from the plane’s other “black box”--the flight data recorder--showed that all of the systems aboard the plane were functioning normally and that it was descending toward the airport in a normal, slightly nose-high attitude.

But Flight 801 descended too quickly, slamming into a lush jungle ridge almost 1,000 feet below the normal flight path. Only 29 of the 254 people aboard the plane survived the crash, and most of those were severely injured.

On Friday night, George Black, the NTSB member in overall command of the investigation, repeated his earlier observation that because the crash appeared to be “a controlled flight into terrain,” human error of some kind probably was a major factor in the accident.”

“That’s usually the situation,” he told reporters at the NTSB’s nightly briefing.

Black refused to say whose error that might have been, although the only candidates suggested thus far are the pilot and co-pilot.

But exactly why the crew strayed past the normal final approach path is still not clear.

A radio beam from the airport, called a glide slope, was not operating. But the cockpit voice recorder shows that the crew was aware of this and was using a commonly employed alternative system--one utilized at airports throughout the world--to make what sources close to the investigation say should have been a routine landing.

These sources say that the pilot may have adjusted his instruments, read them improperly or simply become confused, believing that he was closer to the runway than he actually was.

Black said the captain of Flight 801, who has not been officially identified, had a total of about 8,700 hours in the cockpit--”about the average number of hours for a mid-career pilot.” Black said there is no evidence to support published reports that the cockpit crew was fatigued.

This morning, U.S. military personnel, working in steaming tropical temperatures relieved only by short, heavy rain showers, resumed the grim work of recovering human remains from the crash site.

“They’re performing a tremendous task on what is one awful job,” Black said.

As the military personnel did their work, NTSB investigators used sophisticated laser equipment to draw a three-dimensional diagram of the crash site, pinpointing every scrap of wreckage. Removal of the debris probably will not begin for about a week.

Specialists in Washington listened for more details from the cockpit voice recorder and worked to decipher additional information from the flight data recorder. Investigative teams began perusing the plane’s maintenance records and the cockpit crew’s flight records.

NTSB personnel also began interviewing the survivors. Some of the most severely injured were being transferred to hospitals in South Korea and the mainland United States. Two of the survivors are flight attendants.

Black said the only reason anyone survived the crash is that the plane slowed considerably as it slid one-third of a mile across the ground before striking a hillock, breaking up and bursting into flames. He said seven survivors had been thrown clear of the wreckage.