Victims of Plane Crash Are Identified as 2 Chinese Students
Jed Jacobsohn/Reuters
Asiana Flight 214, arriving
from Seoul, South Korea, broke apart and burst into flames as it crashed
while landing at San Francisco International Airport. The plane’s tail,
landing gear and one of its engines were ripped off.
By NORIMITSU ONISHI and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: July 7, 2013
SAN FRANCISCO — The two passengers killed Saturday during the crash of a
Korean jetliner while landing in San Francisco were identified Sunday
as two 16-year-old Chinese students.
Multimedia
Video: Footage After the Crash
Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Journalists filled a room at the headquarters of
Asiana Airlines, which was established in 1988 and is based in South
Korea.
John Green/San Jose Mercury News, via Associated Press
Fire crews worked on an Asiana Airlines jet that
crashed on landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday.
The New York Times
The two students, both women, were believed to have been seated toward
the back of the Asiana Airlines passenger jet when it crashed Saturday
at San Francisco International Airport, the president of airlines, Yoon
Young-doo, said Sunday. At least 180 people were injured.
As federal investigators begin trying to determine what caused the
crash, Mr. Yoon said Asiana Airlines did not believe there was anything
wrong with the Boeing 777, which had been purchased in 2006.
“So far, we don’t believe that there was anything wrong with the
B777-200 or its engine,” he said. He also apologized for the crash,
saying, “We are deeply sorry for causing the trouble.”
The flight had originated in Shanghai and left Seoul for San Francisco,
the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said.
The two students, Chinese media reported Sunday, were from Zhejiang
province in eastern China. Of the 291 passengers on board, 141 were
Chinese, including at least 70 students and teachers on their way to
summer camps, Chinese media reported.
Asiana Airlines identified the two students as Ye Meng Yuan and Wang Lin Jia.
Smoke billowed out
of holes in the fuselage of the Boeing 777 on Saturday afternoon as
firefighters rushed to douse the wreckage and passengers scrambled to
safety down inflated escape chutes. The plane’s tail, landing gear and
one of its engines were ripped off.
“It hit with its tail, spun down the runway, and bounced,” said one witness, Stefanie Turner,
32. Despite incredible damage to the plane, left dismembered and
scarred, with large chunks of its body burned away, many of the 307
aboard were able to walk away on their own.
Joanne Hayes-White, the San Francisco fire chief, said 182 people were injured and 123 were unhurt.
“We observed multiple numbers of people coming down the chutes and
walking to their safety,” Chief Hayes-White said. At least five people
were listed in critical condition at hospitals. The chief said the two
bodies were discovered on the runway and that several passengers were
found in San Francisco Bay, where, she said, they may have sought refuge
from the fire.
One passenger, a South Korean teenager wearing a yellow T-shirt and
plaid shorts, said that the plane “went up and down, and then it hit the
ground.”
“The top collapsed on people, so there were many injuries,” he said,
referring to the overhead luggage compartments, before an airport
official whisked him back into the Reflection Room, a quiet center in
the airport for thought and meditation.
The crash comes after a remarkable period of safety for airlines in the
United States. It has been four and a half years since the last airline
crash — a safety record unmatched for half a century. That accident
involved Colgan Air Flight 3407
(operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407), which crashed on
approach to Buffalo International Airport, killing 50 people, including
one on the ground on Feb. 12, 2009. Globally, as well, last year was the
safest since 1945, with 23 deadly accidents and 475 fatalities,
according to the Aviation Safety Network, an accident researcher.
San Francisco General Hospital, the city’s trauma center, had received
52 patients as of 8:40 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, according to
Rachael Kagan, a hospital spokeswoman.
Dr. Chris Barton, the chief of emergency services at the hospital, said,
“We have seen a lot of patients with spinal injuries.” He said those
injuries included spinal compression and burst vertebral bodies, the largest part of the vertebra.
Doctors also saw patients with fractures of their long bones and blunt-force injuries to the head and abdomen.
Some patients had been discharged, but the hospital provided no details.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it had dispatched a team
to from Washington to investigate, and declined to speculate as to a
cause of the crash. But witnesses said that the plane approached the
airport at an awkward angle, and it appeared that its tail hit before it
bounced down the runway. When it stopped, they said, passengers had
scant time to escape before a blaze burned through the fuselage.
“I looked up out the window and saw the plane coming in extremely fast
and incredibly heavy,” said Isabella Lacaze, 18, from Texas, who saw the
crash from the San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront.
“It came in at a 30- or 45-degree angle and the tail was way, way lower
than the nose,” said another witness, Ms. Turner.
“I remember watching the nose go to the ground and the tail way up in
the air and then the tail back to ground hard,” Ms. Lacaze said. At that
point, she said, the tail snapped off and the rest of the plane skidded
down the runway.
“The smoke was not bad at all at first,” she said. “It was like one
cloud. It took maybe a minute or two for the chutes to come out of the
side,” she said, and people began to pour out almost immediately.
“The back got the worst of it,” a passenger on the plane, Elliot Stone,
told CNN. He said that the plane seemed to be coming in at a sharp angle
and just as they reached the runway, it seemed to gain speed. It struck
the tarmac with tremendous force, he said, and the people in the back
of the plan “got hammered.”
“Everybody’s head goes up to the ceiling,” he said.
Some passengers scrambled out of the plane even before the chutes
deployed, he said. A number of people lay injured near the wreckage for
20 to 30 minutes before ambulances arrived, Mr. Stone said. Many people
got off relatively unscathed, he said, but he saw at least five people
with severe injuries.
David Eun,
who said in a Twitter message that he had been a passenger on the
plane, posted a photograph of a downed Asiana jetliner from ground
level, which showed some passengers walking away from the aircraft.
Flame retardant materials inside the plane, including foil wrapping
under the seats, most likely helped protect many passengers said Steven
B. Wallace, who was the director of the office of accident investigation
at the Federal Aviation Administration from 2000 to 2008.
The F.A.A. has required the use of such materials for several decades.
Mr. Wallace said that even though an Air France A340 suffered a worse
fire after overrunning a runway in Toronto in 2005, all 309 people on
board survived. Only 12 were seriously injured. “It seems clear that the
airplane hit short of the runway,” Mr. Wallace said. “Why that
happened, I don’t know.”
Mr. Wallace, who is a licensed commercial pilot, said the pilot could
have made a mistake and come in too low or there could have been wind
shear.
An aviation official, who did not want to be identified discussing a
developing investigation, said that the plane was not making an
emergency landing, and that the situation had been routine until the
crash.
If the plane touched down too soon, before the tarmac or before the area
intended for landings, it may have torn off its landing gear, and been
skidding along on its engine cowlings, said Arnold Reiner, a retired
airline captain and the former director of flight safety at Pan Am. “At
that point, all bets are off,” he said, and the tail may have hit the
ground with more force than the fuselage was intended to handle.
One question for investigators, Mr. Reiner said, is who was at the
controls. The 777 has a two-pilot cockpit, but on a flight that long,
there is typically a “relief pilot” or two on board, so no one has to
work continuously for such a long period. That may have resulted in a
junior person at the controls.
The South Korean transport ministry said Sunday that there were four
crew members assigned to the cockpit. It identified the chief pilot as
Lee Jeong-min, who has worked at Asiana since 1996. The co-pilot, Lee
Kang-guk, joined Asiana in 1994 as a pilot trainee and won his passenger
jet pilot’s license in 2001, it said.
Mr. Yoon, of Asiana Airlines, said three of the four pilots had each
logged more than 10,000 hours of flight time, and that the fourth had
logged slightly fewer than that.
South Korean carriers have faced safety difficulties in the past. In
August 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration froze service from
South Korean carriers coming into the United States, limiting them to
the schedules and aircraft they were then flying, because it said that
safety regulation by the South Korean government was inadequate. The
restrictions were later lifted.
In December 1999, a Korean Air Lines 747 cargo jet crashed near London.
Delta Air Lines canceled its code-share agreement with Korean Air until
Korean improved. In August 1997, a Korean Air 747 came in short of the
runway in Guam, killing 228 people.
Asiana Airlines,
established in 1988, is based in South Korea and flies to Los Angeles,
Seattle, Chicago and New York, in addition to destinations in Europe,
the Russian far east, China, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
It said in a statement that it was trying to find the number of
casualties and the cause of the accident, and that it would “cooperate
with the related authorities.” Among the 291 passengers, 141 were
Chinese, 77 were South Korean, 61 were American, 3 were Canadian, 3 were
Indian, 1 was Vietnamese, 1 was Japanese and 1 was French, the
transport ministry said. Thirty of the passengers were children between
the ages of 2 and 12, the agency said, and one was an infant. A crew of
16 was also on board.
The transportation safety board said it would examine a variety of
factors, including human performance, weather and maintenance. Mr.
Wallace said the flight data recorder on the Asiana 777 was probably in
the part of the tail that broke off. But he said the containers for the
recorders were so rugged that the data should be intact.
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