FAA hit in KAL crash
on GuamThe NTSB will rule Nov. 2 on a
By Jennifer Thomas
probable cause, and is expected
to criticize the agency
Bloomberg NewsWASHINGTON -- The Federal Aviation Administration will face criticism of its oversight of foreign air carriers that fly to the U.S. at a meeting next month to determine why a Korean Air Lines jumbo jetliner crashed into a mountain just before it was to land at a Guam airport.
KAL Flight 801, a Boeing 747 carrying 254 passengers and crew members, crashed Aug. 6, 1997, in heavy rain several miles off course from the airport runway. The crash killed 228 people.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board will rule on a probable cause at the Nov. 2 meeting.
NTSB investigators focused on crew performance and said the pilots may have rushed landing preparations and failed to follow correct approach procedures.
Their draft report, reported earlier today in the Wall Street Journal, said inadequate U.S. and Korean oversight of safety operations at the airline also played a role.
"At the hearing, the team of investigators present their report and their analysis of the facts," NTSB spokesman Paul Schlamm said.
"The board discusses it and they can change any and all of it."
He declined to comment on the draft contents.
Crew error, the lack of an airport approach system, and weather all were investigated in the crash.
Companies such as Rockwell International Corp. and Allied Signal Inc. that make devices to enhance pilots' awareness of their surroundings in bad weather could benefit from the probe.
Flight 801, coming from Seoul, disappeared from air-traffic radar screens after being cleared for landing approach to A.B. Won Pat International Airport in Agana, Guam.
The control tower in Guam lost contact with the plane, scheduled to land at 1:40 a.m., when it was about three miles from the runway.
The airport's "glide slope" system, which guides incoming planes on their runway approach, was out of service.
Without the system, pilots use a device that tells them their distance from the airport to determine the proper rate of descent.
Flight 801's crew may not have known the system was out of service.
According to the NTSB, the KAL flight supervisor who met with the pilot and flight engineer before the airplane left Seoul didn't discuss the Guam airport's glide slope system with them.
Minutes before the crash, the air-traffic controller handling the flight's approach cleared the plane for an instrument landing and told the crew that the glide slope system was "unusable."
The transcript of the crew's conversation with air-traffic controllers indicates the crew never acknowledged that the device was out of service.
Investigators said at a March 1998 hearing on the crash that Flight 801's pilots inexplicably brought the plane in a straight descent toward a radio beacon and missed a beep that should have sounded to tell them that they were nowhere near the runway.
In April 1999, Delta Air Lines Inc., the third-largest U.S. carrier, suspended its flying partnership with KAL because of accidents on the Korean airline.
The decision came days after a Korean Air cargo plane crashed in China, killing five people.
Oversight of foreign carriers already is under review at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
In May, the agency established a safety task force that is to look at U.S. airlines which have joint marketing agreements with foreign carriers.
The task force, which includes the DOT, the U.S. military, the FAA and the airline industry, is expected to make recommendations to the transportation secretary this year.
