An anchor for Bay Area KTVU-TV read some supposed names of Pilots involved in the Asiana crash landing at San Francisco on July 7th. The report was accompanied by a slide with the phony names listed next to a photo of the burnt plane.

The four names were claimed to be:

Captain Sum Ting Wong (something wrong)

Wi Tu Lo (We too low

Ho Lee Fuk (Holy F***)

Ban Ding Ow

The station after a short break corrected the “mistake” but by then the Broadcast had spread across the Internet.

Now millions of viewers have seen the broadcast. In its correction, the TV station claimed it had checked with the NTSB (National Transportation Safely Board) before broadcasting the names. It turns out the NTSB official was an unpaid summer intern. Apparently this intern was fired on Monday. The NTSB last Friday said that the intern erroneously who confirmed the names did it “outside the scope of his authority.” Ahem. Was he he source of the racist names or an over enthusiastic student trying to help?

The TV station apologised but did not reveal where the names originated.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dphVmYdXjdk&sns=em This needs to be investigated. Was this a serious mistake or a misguided attempt to be funny?

Asiana has decided to sue KTVU-TV to “strongly respond to its racially discriminatory report” saying the report “badly damaged” the reputation of the airline and its pilots. It was hard to work out the rationale for the airline of the suit and in fact they subsequently withdrew the suit.

The names of the actual Asiana Airlines pilots in the plane’s cockpit were Lee Kang-kook and co-pilot Lee Jeong-min.

The last word on this incident comes from Stephen Colbert:

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