The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday (local time) that the engines and automatic flight controls were working normally on the doomed Asiana Airlines flight that crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport last Saturday.

Two Chinese teenagers were killed and 180 of the 307 people on board were hurt, most with minor injuries, when the airliner, completing an 11-hour trip from Seoul, smashed into a seawall bordering the airport’s runway.

“The engines and the flight control services appear to be responding as expected,” NTSB chairwoman Deborah Hersman said in her final news briefing before the team concludes the on-site investigation.

“There is no anomalous behavior of the autopilot, of the flight director, and of the autothrottles.”

The NTSB chief said investigators have found no sign of mechanical problems during the Asiana flight, or with the Boeing 777-200ER jetliner, putting the focus of the ongoing probe on the pilots at the controls.

Korea’s Transport Ministry, however, made it clear on Friday that any malfunctions in the autothrottle still needed to be investigated based on flight data recorder that is being analyzed currently at the NTSB’s Washington headquarters. 

“We are looking at what the NTSB announcement indicates exactly,” said Jang Man-hee, an aviation policy director at the ministry at a briefing in Seoul when he was asked if the NTSB announcement indicates possible pilot error.

“We still need to investigate other recording systems, especially flight data recorder,” he added.

During the first five days of the NTSB investigation, Hersman has said repeatedly that pilots Lee Gang-kuk, who was landing the big jet for his first time at the airport, and his supervisor, Lee Jeong-Min, were ultimately responsible for a safe landing.

Investigators stressed again that they were looking at all possibilities and no firm conclusions had been reached. The NTSB team will soon head back to its headquarters in Washington with “a mountain of information” to analyze and review and the agency’s final evaluation is expected to take more than a year.

Hersman confirmed Thursday that Lee, the pilot at the controls, told investigators he saw a flash of light at about 500 feet about 34 seconds before impact. But the chairwoman said Lee told investigators that the light did not prevent him from seeing his instruments and that it may have been a reflection of the sun. Other pilots made no mention of a light, she said.

She also said there were two calls to abort the landing, the first came about three seconds before impact, the second, from a different pilot, about 1.5 seconds later.

While the pilots were manually flying the jet for the landing, as expected on a clear, sunny day, they said that they thought the airliner’s speed was being controlled by an autothrottle.

Inspectors found that the autothrottle had been “armed,” or made ready for activation, she said. But the team is still determining whether it had been engaged.

Even if the autothrottle malfunctioned, Hersman stressed, the pilots were ultimately responsible for control of the airliner.

“There are two pilots in the cockpit for a reason,” she said. “They’re there to fly, to navigate, to communicate and if they’re using automation, a big key is to monitor.”

By Lee Ji-yoon and news reports
(jylee@heraldcorp.com)