[Editorial] Asiana’s shunning of government query results

The Ministry of Construction and Transportation has announced the preliminary results of its study of what went wrong in June when an Asiana Airlines passenger plane was forced to make an emergency landing after being badly damaged in a hailstorm. According to the ministry’s findings, the pilots did not avoid rain clouds as required by aviation regulations and the plane’s speed and direction were inappropriate. The control tower and the Aviation Meteorological Office failed to provide the plane with adequate rain cloud data. In other words, it was not nature that caused the problem, but the decision to fly against safety guidelines. Most of what preliminary Hankyoreh reports suggested, it turns out, was accurate.

Asiana has been found to have been much at fault, so its response is dumbfounding. Instead of apologizing for putting hundreds of lives at risk, it is ignoring the government’s findings, saying they are "only an analysis of the end results of what happened." It also says it is going to reward the pilot for the way he avoided a major disaster.

Even back when the incident happened, Asiana kept quiet about what it had done wrong and instead used the event for publicity, talking only about how the pilot had prevented a major accident. It either lied or changed its story about where and when the incident took place and about how much distance the pilot had maintained from the storm clouds. An approach to safety that says "everything’s dandy ’cause no one died" is dangerous enough, but you wonder how Asiana thinks it can disregard even official government findings. The authorities need to determine whether Asiana or government agencies broke any rules for which they need to be held responsible.

The government’s weak response is also a problem. The Ministry of Construction and Transportation failed to correct items confirmed to be problems, things that it could have dealt with immediately because it was still investigating. Subsequently, it left travelers at risk during the peak summer season. Its response has been lame, as well; all it did was issue an official recommendation to the agencies related to air travel and told them to figure out ways to prevent the same type of incident from happening in the future.

What transpired was the combined result of an error of judgment on the part of the pilot and mistakes by the control tower and the Aviation Meteorological Office. Pilots say they have packed schedules and feel the temptation to go to unreasonable lengths to maintain them, and that flying into Incheon International Airport makes it more difficult to fly around weather patterns. This was not a chance event, something that can be blamed on the mistakes of just a few people. It will happen again if there is not a fundamental change to the bad practices that threaten passenger safety.