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 absence of precise vertical guidance create more demands on pilot skills and cognitive performance than precision approaches. An expert on CFIT accidents testified the following at the Board's public hearing:


 * Nonprecision approaches generally are much more complex than precision approaches. For many pilots, they are less familiar. They are more error-prone. They require [a] more comprehensive briefing. They need particularly careful and accurate monitoring, and it is possible for complex step-down procedures for steps to be missed or to be taken out of step. In other words, to get one step ahead of the airplane could be fatal. Such approaches also need much more carefully managed airplane crew and checklist management, and it is a characteristic of many CFIT accidents that they occur when the crew is preoccupied or distracted by other tasks.

The Safety Board notes that the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), in its submission regarding this accident, estimated that air transport pilots typically conduct one to three nonprecision approaches a year and practice these approaches "just as infrequently" in the simulator. In its investigation of the November 12, 1995, accident involving American Airlines flight 1572, an MD-83 that crashed in East Granby, Connecticut, while on final approach to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, the Board found that even relatively minor errors in the monitoring of the execution of a nonprecision approach can lead to an accident.

The Safety Board is concerned that the repeated presentation of a single nonprecision approach scenario throughout simulator training (to the exclusion of all other kinds of nonprecision approaches) provides insufficient training in nonprecision approaches. Specifically, the repetition limits pilots' opportunity to understand and practice the flying techniques necessary to perform the different kinds of nonprecision approaches and limits their ability to successfully apply these techniques to novel situations or unusual approach configurations encountered in line operations, such as the localizer approach at Guam. Further, Korean Air's reliance on the same approach for both training and checking resulted in an inadequate evaluation of a flight crew's ability to execute the varied nonprecision approaches that might be encountered in line operations. Therefore, the Safety Board concludes that Korean Air's training in the