The San Francisco plane crash at a glance
Jul 7, 2013, 6:36 PM
(AP) – A look at Saturday’s crash of Asiana Airlines flight 214 at the San Francisco International Airport:
_ WHAT HAPPENED: The Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashed while landing after a likely 10-hour-plus flight from Seoul, South Korea. The flight originated in Shanghai and stopped in Seoul before the long trek to San Francisco.
_ PACKED FLIGHT: There were 307 people aboard _ 291 passengers and 16 crew members. Two people aboard the plane died. Of the 182 injured people taken to hospitals, 19 remained hospitalized on Sunday, six of them in critical condition. The remaining 133 had minor to moderate injuries, while many of the other passengers or crew members had more minor injuries that didn’t require extra treatment. Thirty of the passengers were children.
_ PASSENGERS: South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that the plane’s passengers included 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans, 61 Americans, three Canadians, three from India, one Japanese, one Vietnamese and one from France, while the nationalities of the remaining three haven’t been confirmed. Chinese state media identified the dead as two 16-year-old girls who were middle school students in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. China Central Television cited a fax from Asiana Airlines to the Jiangshan city government in identifying them as Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia.
_ WHAT WENT WRONG? The cause isn’t clear, but based on witness accounts and video of the wreckage, one aviation safety expert suggested the plane may have approached the runway too low and a part of the plane may have caught the seawall at the end of the runway. Some eyewitnesses said the aircraft seemed to lose control and that the tail may have hit the ground. The NTSB was sending a team to the site to probe the crash.
_ WHAT’S NEXT? NTSB investigators face their first full day of investigating the cause.
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