 |
|
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.
|
An Asiana Airlines passenger jet traveling
from Seoul, South Korea, crashed while landing Saturday at San Francisco
International Airport, smashed into pieces and caught fire, killing at least
two people and injuring more than 180 others.
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.
The flight
originated in Shanghai, and the two people who were killed were Chinese women,
the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport reported early
Sunday. 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.
It was not
immediately clear what caused this plane to lose control on a clear summer day.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it had dispatched a team to from
Washington to investigate, and declined to speculate. 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.
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, the statement said, 141 were Chinese, 77 were South
Korean, 61 were American, 3 were Canadian, 2 were Indian, 1 was Vietnamese and
1 was Japanese, 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment