If this is what really happened, I'll say the same thing I said then - it shocks me that airline pilots with thousands of flight hours can make the most elementary piloting mistake possible.
But I've read accident reports before, and it's rarely a good idea to speculate. I won't have an opinion about this until the official report is published.
Pilots are human, and they make mistakes. Good training, having two pilots on the flightdeck and having good SOPs should prevent anything like this ever happening. It looks like training and/or SOPs were severely lacking here.
As well as the "don't waste our company money doing a go-around" fuckwitted notion, people are saying that Asian airlines don't like doing visual approaches period. Therefore whenever the pilot is required to do a visual approach, he/she will be severely lacking in the skills to do it.
well, until report is out, we're here to speculate (or to read a good speculation if we're lucky :). From the Flightaware data the plane had 109kts at 100feet altitude before the seawall. The stall speed of 777 is about 110kts (its Vat is ~140, and it is 1.3 of the stall). And the speed was falling as the next recording is 85kts. While we can only guess about the original cause - pilot error or hardware, etc... - the stall seems to be there.
Are you sure that the Flightaware data is accurate enough? When flying a glider, I have attempted to make similar judegments from GPS log data when doing an outlanding, and I'd be similarly careful when using radar data from a website.
I don't want to be very negative here, but my point is I've made wrong calls about this when speculating in the past. So currently I'm opposed to doing it for reasons other than entertainment.
well, i'd be surprised if there are people here for any other reasons :)
the flightaware data correlates very well with what is on video. Personally i spent a bunch of time on Coyote Pt. so i can mentally correlate the video with how it looks for other planes/landings at SFO. As we aren't ordained NTSB officers, we're free to make wrong calls :)
But I've read accident reports before, and it's rarely a good idea to speculate. I won't have an opinion about this until the official report is published.