(AFP) US investigators on Tuesday will interview the pilot who was at the controls of the Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 when it crashed on landing in San Francisco, the agency chief probing the disaster said.

“We’ve got the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, which can give us discreet data points,” National Transportation Safety Board Deborah Hersman told CNN in an interview.

“But we want to get to the pilots to understand what they were thinking, what they were experiencing,” she said.

“We have interviewed crew members who were in the cockpit at the time of the crash, but we have not yet interviewed the flying pilot. We’re going to do that today.”

Two teenage Chinese girls were killed and more than 180 people were injured Saturday as the plane clipped a seawall and went skidding out of control as it tried to land, breaking up and burst into flames.

The plane, on a long haul flight from Seoul, had four pilots but the one landing it was in training to fly the 777.

“The pilots can provide us outstanding observations from their experiences on the flight deck. They can tell us what was happening, what they know, what procedures they’re following,” Hersman said.

A critical question is what the other pilots were doing during the landing, and more broadly how they interacted, she said.

“I think that’s what’s so important about understanding what the pilots were seeing, what they were experiencing, how much they were doing manually, how were they were relying on automation, what their expectations and understanding are.

“And so that information will be helpful to us, but I will tell you, approach and landing is a critical phase of flight. Everyone’s got to be at the top of their game, they’ve got to be paying attention,” she said.

“And we also want to make sure that if they’re relying on automation or using automation, that those tools are used appropriately.”

SOURCE AFP