Neurosurgeon Geoffrey Manley, MD, PhD told PBS that doctors treating passenger injuries for Asiana Flight 214 found a unique injury pattern.
“All of the passengers were in the sam type of seat, wearing the same type of seatbelt . . . we did see a number of spinal injuries and traumatic brain injuries as well as some profound abdominal injuries and extremity injuries. So it was a picture of polytrauma with an abundance of spine injuries and traumatic brain injuries as well. Many of these patients looked much better than they imaged so we had people that were the walking wounded.”
NTSB worker carries out the black box (NTSB)
As is becoming all too familiar, preliminary NTSB reports indicate that the UPS Airbus A300 flight that crashed in Birmingham, Alabama on Wednesday killing the 2 person crew made no distress call before the crash. Likewise, Asiana 214 which crash landed at San Francisco International just 5 weeks earlier made no distress call before hitting the edge of the seawall and shearing off the landing gear and tail section of the plane while killing 3 and injuring over 100 passengers.
(AP)
According to a report on the ABC7-San Francisco website, a firefighter carried 16-year-old Ye Meng Yuan from the back of the Asiana flight 214 airplane and left her near the left wing, a hazardous place as the huge ARFF rigs jockeyed to fight the fire. San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White says a blanket of foam may have covered the girl, and Mobile 37, the truck firefighter Elyse Duckett was driving, did not have Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) that can pick up a person’s heat.
(Aviation.TV)
A new wrinkle in the mystery surrounding the crash raises questions about not only how pilots are trained to fly new aircraft, but also the if the communication protocol in the cockpit differs based on culture. In a piece for National Geographic, Clark Howard asks if author Malcolm Gladwell’s Theory of Cockpit Culture could apply to Asiana Crash? In the 2008 best selling book Outliers, Gladwell wrote about the safety record of Korean Air. In the book, Gladwell said that Korean Air’s problem at the time was not old planes or poor crew training.
“What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical.”
