Bits Blog: A Virtual Airline, a Real Crash

Inquiry Suggests Chance That Mechanical Failure Had Role in Crash

Investigators in the cockpit of the wreckage found the auto-throttle switches set to the “armed” position, meaning that the auto-throttle could have been engaged, depending on various other settings, she said. The disclosure is far from conclusive, but raises the clear possibility that there was a mechanical failure or that the crew misunderstood the automated system it was using.

The chairwoman, Deborah A. P. Hersman, also said that interviews of the three pilots who were in the cockpit at the time of impact showed that the speed indicator on the flat-panel displays in the cockpit had drifted down into a crosshatched area, meaning that the instruments were saying that the plane was moving too slowly.

At the dual controls, the pilot flying the plane was undergoing initial training as he upgraded from a smaller plane, and was supervised by a veteran pilot who was new as an instructor, Ms. Hersman said. The instructor told investigators that between 500 feet and 200 feet in altitude, the crew was also correcting from a “lateral deviation,” meaning that the plane was too far to the right or left (she did not specify which) and realized they were too low.

At 200 feet, the instructor pilot told investigators in an interview, he noticed they were too slow. “He recognized that the auto-throttles were not maintaining speed,” and began preparing the airplane to go around for another try. But it was too late.

Ms. Hersman made clear that the safety board was looking to see if there was a generic problem with the runway and the approach path. Her agency requested data from the Federal Aviation Administration, which operates the air traffic system, on other recent arrivals by Boeing 777s, and recent go-arounds, cases in which crews broke off the approach because of a problem.

As the investigation continued, others — including lawyers, passenger advocates and a pilots’ union — began jockeying for position.

The crash resulted in an unusual mix of deaths and injuries, said Robert A. Clifford, an aviation lawyer in Chicago, who pointed out that lawyers in his specialty are usually pursuing wrongful-death claims, not personal injury ones. Injured passengers will need legal help, he said.

But Hans Ephraimson-Abt, who leads the Air Crash Victims Families Group, and who frequently lobbies for passenger rights and represents the families of people killed, said that under the governing international law, those injured were covered by a no-fault provision. Under the 1999 Montreal Protocol, he said, “they are entitled to be reimbursed for all their property damages, and economic and noneconomic damages, including psychological counseling.” All that was required, he said, was to show medical bills or calculate lost earnings.

Mr. Ephraimson-Abt’s 23-year-old daughter was one of the 286 passengers on board Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by a Soviet fighter plane in 1983 after a crewman’s navigation error.

Mr. Clifford and other lawyers, however, have been making public statements since the crash about safety problems and stressing their expertise in pursuing claims.

On Tuesday, Mr. Clifford said that another party, not covered by the Montreal Protocol, could be vulnerable to claims: Boeing. The plane did not have an aural warning of low airspeed, he said, even though the safety board recommended 10 years ago that the Federal Aviation Administration convene a panel of experts to consider installing them. If the plane was unsafe, he said, the manufacturer could face suits.

A retired 777 captain, Chuck Hosmer, who flew for American Airlines and later Air India, said that many foreign carriers had a reluctance to land the plane manually, and thus lacked proficiency in the technique. The Asiana crew was attempting a manual landing on Saturday because an instrument landing system was out of service. And though there were four pilots on the Asiana plane, three of them very experienced in the 777, pilots in some cultures are reluctant to contradict a pilot at the controls, Mr. Hosmer said.

In fact, the safety board has investigated previous accidents in which cultural factors have reduced the effectiveness of the crew, and that is one of the areas of inquiry here, investigators said.

On Tuesday, a pilots’ union, the U.S. Airline Pilots Association, issued a statement critical of the safety board, asserting that the board’s quick release of “incomplete, out-of-context information” had “fueled rampant speculation about the cause of the accident” and created the impression that it was pilot error.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the retired 777 captain who flew for American Airlines and later Air India. He is Chuck Hosmer, not Robert Maurer.

Michael Hastings, Polk Winner, Dies in Crash at 33

Hastings, who was 33, was described by many of his colleagues as an unfailingly bright and hard-charging reporter who wrote stories that mattered. Most recently, he wrote about politics for the news website BuzzFeed, where the top editor said colleagues were devastated by the loss.

"Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians," said Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief.

Smith said he learned of the death from a family member.

Authorities said there was a car crash early Tuesday in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles that killed a man, but coroner's officials could not confirm whether Hastings was the victim.

Hastings won a 2010 George Polk Award for magazine reporting for his Rolling Stone cover story "The Runaway General."

His story was credited with ending Gen. Stanley McChrystal's career after it revealed the military's candid criticisms of the Obama administration.

Hastings quoted McChrystal and his aides mocking Obama administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, over their war policies.

At a Pentagon ceremony for his subsequent retirement in 2010, McChrystal made light of the episode in his farewell address. The four-star general warned his comrades in arms, "I have stories on all of you, photos of many, and I know a Rolling Stone reporter."

When he died, Hastings was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where Managing Editor Will Dana was quoted Tuesday saying Hastings exuded "a certain kind of electricity" that exists in great reporters whose stories burn to be told.

"I'm sad that I'll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write, and sad that he won't be stopping by my office for any more short visits which would stretch for two or three completely engrossing hours," Dana said.

Hastings was also an author of books about the wars. "The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan" was published late last year and details shocking exploits of the military overseas.

In 2010, with the publication of "I Lost My Love in Baghdad," Hastings told the story of being a young war correspondent whose girlfriend died in Iraq.

In the summer 2013 issue of Vermont Life magazine, Hastings was quoted telling an audience at the Burlington Book Festival that he doesn't believe in objectivity in journalism.

"What I try to do is be intellectually honest in my writing," he said.

Hastings' family moved to Vermont when he was 16, a state he told the magazine was his "spiritual home." According to the magazine, he lived in New York with his wife.

Off the Shelf: In ‘Buy Side,’ a Wall Street Trader’s Crash Landing

But I suspect that things might have turned out almost as badly as they did for Turney Duff, a callow, young hedge fund trader who writes of his own noteworthy flameout in a bracing new Wall Street memoir called “The Buy Side” (Crown, 320 pages).

Mr. Duff’s tale calls to mind books like “Bright Lights, Big City,” by Jay McInerney, and especially “Liar’s Poker,” by Michael Lewis — stories of wide-eyed newcomers confronted by the temptations of moneyed New York. As literature, it doesn’t rise to the same class. As spectacle, it easily trumps both.

Mr. Duff makes millions, pays brand-name rappers to perform at his birthday party and marries a glamorous singer. But instead of riding into the sunset, he ends up retreating to sumptuous hotel suites where he inhales piles of cocaine, swills Scotch and watches pornographic movies. By himself.

Along the way, by his own admission, Mr. Duff becomes a caricature of the arrogant young Wall Streeter that so much of America loves to hate. If “The Buy Side” is remembered for any single line, it will be the remark that Mr. Duff says he uttered one evening upon confronting a lengthy queue outside a downtown Manhattan nightclub. Barging past the bouncers, he announces: “I don’t stand in lines. I snort them.” He and his trading pals think the joke so hilarious that they later emblazon it on souvenir T-shirts.

A middle-class kid from Maine, Mr. Duff began his career in 1994, in the early years of the hedge fund era, when he arrived in New York as a fresh-faced journalism graduate from Ohio University. Unable to land a job in writing or anything else, he reaches out to an uncle on Wall Street, who arranges interviews with several of the big firms. Mr. Duff aces the one at Morgan Stanley by recapping the previous evening’s episode of “Melrose Place,” the interviewer’s favorite television show. Hey, so much for that diploma.

One of the book’s strengths is Mr. Duff’s self-awareness. He realizes what he became. At Morgan, where he spent five years as a desk assistant, he knew little about Wall Street and learned even less about investing, acknowledging that he was too lazy to read research. Where he thrived was after the closing bell, when he proved adept at staging office parties and leading his peers — and a few higher-ups — through the assorted watering holes he frequented.

His light-bulb moment comes one evening when he successfully introduces a group of pretty girls to a senior trader. “I realize I’m in my element,” he writes. “I feel in total control and at ease. Only in looking back can I see how seminal this moment is. I would never be able to stand out at my job. There I’m out-experienced, out-connected and out-degreed. But here, with a glass in hand, I have as good a chance as any to move and shake.”

Mr. Duff puts his social skills to good use when, unable to secure an actual trading job at Morgan, he moves to an up-and-coming hedge fund, the Galleon Group — the same Galleon Group that was eviscerated in Wall Street’s continuing insider-trading scandals.

As a “buy side” trader executing transactions for senior portfolio managers, he is a conduit to the “sell side” traders at the big Wall Street firms who actually carry out his trades. Mr. Duff’s decisions on how and where to allocate his trades make him of crucial importance to the sell-side traders, who earn commissions on them.

It is Mr. Duff’s portrait of how sell-side traders ardently romance their buy-side counterparts that is probably the book’s most memorable contribution to Wall Street literature. He takes everything they offer: booze, dinners, Super Bowl tickets, private jets to Las Vegas weekends, parties in South Beach, lots of cocaine and, while at Galleon, scads of tips that move stocks. One of his mentors, a trader named David Slaine, ended up cooperating with the government’s Galleon investigation, but the scandal proves peripheral to the book.

WHAT stays with you is the portrait of a young man who seemingly never met a temptation he could deny.

For a time, Mr. Duff rides high, earning million-dollar bonus checks, renting a TriBeCa triplex with drop-dead Hudson River views and eventually adding a wife, a Long Island manse and a beloved daughter. But the drugs soon take hold, and his long downward spiral grows uglier at every turn. After two stays in rehabilitation facilities, he loses the trading job he took after leaving Galleon, then his marriage and the real estate. The financial crisis does the rest, and today, Mr. Duff says, he tries to make a living writing from a tiny apartment in Long Island City, Queens.

Mr. Duff proves a fine wordsmith; his prose is smooth, lean and rhythmic. Where the book misfires — badly — is when he tries to plumb the existential side of things, or to employ literary artifice. There is one cringe-worthy chapter about his girlfriend (who would become his wife), where he begins every few paragraphs with a letter, “I,” then “I L,” and so on, which of course ends up spelling out “I LOVE YOU.” It made me want to throw the book across the room.

Almost as bad is his “Bud Fox” moment, the obligatory episode in these lost-in-Manhattan memoirs when the protagonist must replicate that memorable scene from Wall Street when Charlie Sheen, having sacrificed himself to Gordon Gekko and the gods of capitalism, stares out at the Manhattan skyline and asks, plaintively, “Who am I?”

Mr. Duff’s moment comes the morning after his 34th birthday party, when he wakes on the roof deck of his triplex, fires up a marijuana cigarette and realizes how hollow all his newfound wealth and party-hardy friends make him feel. “Why,” he wonders, “do I feel so empty?” My bet was all that cocaine; whatever the reason, I didn’t much care. I just wanted to smack the guy.

That said, this is an entertaining and cautionary tale, well worth your time. I can imagine parents out there who might give it to children pondering Wall Street careers. Of course, should it excite rather than frighten your budding Bud Fox, you might consider urging an alternative career path.