that the landing and take-offs were much different than the flight home on Thursday.

Yes, the rookie pilots do indeed work the weekends/holidays and there is a noticeable difference in how the plane was handled.

Seniority mattered back then on who piloted the planes on the Mon-Fri gig.

Of course this was some 15 years ago but I can't imagine that it has changed.

I don't like that word "training".

As the company has said, he's been flying with them for 19 years...he was well seasoned, if not on the B777 at SFO.

What I can't imagine is that the aircraft was not warning them about that low air speed. THAT seems so odd as were various reports
that the aircraft was so low over the water and that it appeared to be not lined up for the runway. Again, really odd for such experience.

The boxes will tell a lot.

p.s...noted that it says "the pilot in charge". Has anyone heard or would you know, with his 43 flight hours on the aircraft, would he
most likely have been First Officer? And was he already checked out for the seat or would he have needed additional flight hours before
he as "official" (for lack of another word).

If many of you don't know, the Captains and First Officers switch off generally each leg (my experience) who is "in command"...doing the
take off, landing and (in the Chain of Command) being in charge.

The Pilot in Command (PIC) is always in command whether or not he/she is flying the aircraft. True, the captain and first officer traditionally trade legs but when the f/o is flying, the captain is referred to as "the pilot monitoring" (keeping an eye on the flying pilot) but is still in command. Apparently in this case, the flying pilot was going through a mandatory process referred to as initial operating experience (IOE). He was accompanied by a check airman, a pilot certified to instruct as well as administer check rides. The check airman was the PIC since the flying pilot had not completed his IOE and been "signed off" to act as PIC in a B-777. BTW, when the captain is flying, the f/o is referred to as the pilot monitoring. The idea is to make sure the other pilot isn't screwing up.

http://www.stowsentry.com/ap%20general%20news/2013/07/07/sunday-july-7-2013

bet the sharks are really circling around this accident.

man, what a rotten week or so this has been

On Monday he starts his new job, flying cargo planes full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong.

and a lot more in simulators. He had 9,793 hrs in other planes including 747's and been flying since 1994.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster

This guy may have some blood on his hands!

All pilots understand minimum landing airspeed and just don't violate that except under unusual circumstances. Since this pilot was making one of his first landings in a 777, (think about it, 43 hours for an airplane that usually flies 10 hours between landings, that would make it about 4-8 landings with him in the cockpit) he should have made damn sure the airspeed and sink rate were correct. In fact, the engines should have been on auto pilot as least as far as speed is concerned. The Chairwoman of the NTSB indicated the aircraft was flying significantly below landing speed.

This guy and his airline screwed this up big time. With all the automated systems in the 777, this would be hard to do unless they turned them off for "training purposes". I suspect the term "gross incompetence" applies. Look up pilot error and you will see a picture of this crash.

For more information go to:
http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_07_07_2013_p0-594557.xml

Seconds before crash, passengers knew they were too low

-snip-

Benjamin Levy looked out the window from seat 30K and could see the water of the San Francisco Bay about 10 feet below.

"I don't see any runway, I just see water," Levy recalled.

Further back in the Boeing 777, Xu Das had the same realization.

"Looking through window, it looked on level of the (sea)wall along the runway," he posted on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter.

Then, with no warning from the cockpit, the plane slammed onto the edge of the runway. The impact severed the plane's tail and sent the rest of it spinning on its belly.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/07/us/california-plane-crash/index.html

In all fairness, it's pretty normal for people to think that they're coming in too low to SFO. The runway juts out into the Bay and sits just a few feet above sea level, and the jets touch down near the end of the runway, so it's perfectly normal to see nothing but water just below the plane until just a couple of seconds before touchdown. Unless the passengers have flown into SFO before and know the difference between "normal" low and "unusually" low, they're probably just relaying the same spooky feeling that many first time SFO arrivals experience.

Too see a passenger view of what it's like to land there, check out this video and skip to the 5 minute mark. Pay close attention to how "low" the plane is to the water at and beyond 5:40. I was once flying in from Los Angeles when a woman absolutely flipped out at that point, screaming "We're crashing!" She was pretty embarassed a couple seconds later when we landed without incident. She shouldn't have been embarrassed though...it's a fairly regular thing to hear people gasp or see their eyeballs get really big and knuckes really white just before landing on that runway

Of course, it's even more fun in the famous San Francisco fog. You plunge into it and see nothing out the windows except an impenetrable gray mass. Suddenly, without warning, the sea races up toward you out of the mist. Without anything to give the eyeball perspective, it can look like the plane is coming within INCHES of the water...that one can spook even hardened travellers. Luckily SFO is far enough south that it doesn't get dense fog nearly as often as the city proper.

That would freak me out.

Regardless of whether you're flying 747s or 777s, the fundamental rules and feeling of landing a large aircraft should not be forgotten. I can't believe he got the landing so catastrophically wrong, regardless of whether he was new to the 777 or not.