An American news broadcast have been fooled in to announcing the wrong names of the pilots in the San Francisco plane crash, led, they say, by "Captain Sum Ting Wong".

The KTVU noon broadcast claimed to have "just learned the names of the four pilots on board" the Asiana flight 214 which crashed at San Francisco Airport last weekend.

However, once the names were read aloud it became clear the information was a prank which slipped under the radar of the newsroom, producers and the anchor.

About 15 minutes later the station corrected its mistake, but said an National Transportation Safety Board official had confirmed these names, website TV Spy reported.

"Earlier in the newscast we gave some names of pilots involved in the Asiana Airlines crash. These names were not accurate despite an NTSB official in Washington confirming them late this morning. We apologise for this error," they said.

The network's president Tom Raponi went on: "We sincerely regret the error and took immediate action to apologide, both in the newscast where the mistake occurred, as well as on our website and social media sites. Nothing is more important to us than having the highest level of accuracy and integrity, and we are reviewing our procedures to ensure this type of error does not happen again."

-