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Victims of Plane Crash Are Identified as 2 Chinese Students Pilots Tried to Abort Seconds Before Crash, N.T.S.B. Says
(about 4 hours later)
SAN FRANCISCO — The two passengers killed Saturday during the crash of a South Korean jetliner as it landed in San Francisco were identified Sunday as two 16-year-old Chinese students on their way to a summer camp. SAN FRANCISCO — The chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday that pilots of the Asiana Airlines jetliner that crashed a day earlier in San Francisco tried to abort the landing just seconds before the crash.
The 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 airline, Yoon Young-doo, said Sunday. Their bodies were found on the runway. The safety board chairwoman, Deborah Hersman, said Sunday at a briefing that a crew member called for an increase in speed seven seconds before the plane clipped an embankment at the edge of the runway. She said the plane was traveling well below the speed needed to maintain a stable angle of approach. The jetliner’s cockpit recorder included the sounds of an automatic shaking of the control yoke just before the crash, an indication that the plane was about to stall.
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 bought in 2006. At least 180 people were wounded. The device also recorded a pilot’s voice calling for a go-round 1.5 seconds before the crash. While the engines responded normally, the move came too late to prevent the crash, Ms. Hersman said. The plane’s tail section then snapped off, and the plane skidded across the runway and caught fire.
Ms. Hersman’s description of how the plane slowed generally tracks other data showing the jetliner began to descend too fast because it did not have enough airspeed. Data collected by an aviation firm suggested the plane was descending more than four times faster than normal shortly before it crashed.
At 800 feet over San Francisco Bay, the plane was descending at 4,000 feet a minute on Saturday, according to data gathered from FlightAware, a company that listens to navigation broadcasts and sells the data to airlines and others. The normal approach profile is 600 to 800 feet a minute.
At the briefing, Ms. Hersman focused mainly on whether the pilots erred while making a series of calculations needed to land.
While the pilot should have recognized the abnormally strong descent, the safety board also said Sunday that it was investigating whether construction at the airport — which had temporarily shut down an electronic system that helps guide pilots to the proper landing slope — might have played a role in the crash.
“The glide slope had been out since June,” Ms. Hersman said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“We’re going to take a look into this to understand it,” she said. “But what’s important to note is there are a lot of tools that are available to pilots.”
The FlightAware data indicated that at 100 feet above the water, the plane was descending at more than 270 feet a minute when it should have been slowing to a rate of a few feet per second. FlightAware’s data is not as precise as the information available to investigators from the plane’s flight data recorder, which the safety board began examining on Sunday. But it provides an indication that in the last moments of the flight, unless there was some as-yet undisclosed mechanical problem, crew members, from their own instrumentation, should have been aware that the plane was descending too fast.
Aviation experts said that the pilots, who were both veterans, could have also relied on red and white signal lights on the runway to visually guide the plane to touch down or, if they chose, on the plane’s onboard computers to generate the angle of approach.
Witnesses and passengers have described the jetliner as coming in too low and clipping a rocky embankment at the edge of the water just before the runway. The plane’s tail section then snapped off, and the plane skidded across the runway and caught fire.
Two passengers were killed, and at least 180 people were injured. The dead passengers were identified on Sunday as two 16-year-old Chinese students on their way to a summer camp. The students, both women, were believed to have been seated toward the back of the passenger jet, said Yoon Young-doo, the president of Asiana Airlines. Their bodies were found on the runway.
Mr. Yoon said Asiana Airlines did not believe there was anything wrong with the Boeing 777, which had been bought in 2006. At least 180 people were injured in the crash.
“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.”“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, South Korea, for San Francisco, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. The two students, the Chinese news 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, the Chinese news media reported. The flight had originated in Shanghai and left Seoul, South Korea, for San Francisco, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. The two students, the Chinese news media reported, 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, the Chinese news media reported.
Asiana Airlines identified the two students as Ye Meng Yuan and Wang Lin Jia. Asiana Airlines identified the two students as Ye Meng Yuan and Wang Lin Jia. They were among 30 high school students from the town of Jiangshan who were planning to attend a 15-day English language program at California universities, the Oriental Morning Post, a Shanghai newspaper, reported. The school has been organizing similar summer programs for more than a decade for students who typically pay about $5,000 to attend, the newspaper reported. Five teachers were accompanying the students.
The students were among 30 high school students from the town of Jiangshan in Zhejiang Province who were planning to attend a 15-day English language program at California universities, the Oriental Morning Post, a Shanghai newspaper, reported. The school has been organizing similar summer programs for more than a decade for students who typically pay about $5,000 to attend, the newspaper reported. Four teachers were accompanying the students. Another 30 students and 6 teachers from Shanxi Province in northern China were also aboard the flight, Xinhua, China’s official news service reported. One teacher from that group was reported injured.
Another 30 students and 6 teachers from Shanxi Province in northern China were also aboard the flight, Xinhua, China’s official news service reported. One teacher from that group was reported wounded.
Ms. Wang’s parents were waiting with a group of other parents from their daughter’s school when they were told of her death. They “burst into tears,” according to Zhejiang Online, a news Web site.Ms. Wang’s parents were waiting with a group of other parents from their daughter’s school when they were told of her death. They “burst into tears,” according to Zhejiang Online, a news Web site.
On Friday, Ms. Wang posted her last messages to her account on a Chinese microblogging site. In San Francisco on Sunday, federal investigators continued piecing together the events that led up to and caused the crash.
“Maybe time can dilute the coffee in the cup, it can flatten the contour of memory,” she wrote, according to the Chinese news media. An hour later, she wrote simply, “Go.” Ms. Hersman of the safety board said that there was no indication of a criminal act, but that it was too early to determine what went wrong.
In San Francisco on Sunday, federal investigators continued piecing together the events that led up to and caused the crash. Both flight data recorders have been sent to Washington, and investigators planned to have a preliminary readout soon, said Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board.
Deborah Hersman, the chairwoman of the safety board, said that there was no indication of a criminal act, but that it was too early to determine what went wrong.
“Everything is still on the table,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”“Everything is still on the table,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
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. When the Asiana flight crashed, some of the normal landing aids on the airfield were out of service, but the landing should have been well within the capabilities of the airplane and the crew, aviation experts said.
“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. “Even if it was the least experienced crew in Asiana Airlines, the maneuver that led to this crash, on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, this was a 2 or 3 at the most,'’ said Oscar S. Garcia, the chairman of InterFlight Global Corporation, a consulting firm.
Joanne Hayes-White, the San Francisco fire chief, said 182 people were injured and 123 were unhurt. A government official in Washington said that the instrument landing system, which electronically guides a pilot to the runway, had been out of service for several weeks because of construction at the end of the runway. Another system, which uses patterns of red and white lights to visually guide pilots, was in service, the official said.
“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. Airlines had been told that the system was out of service, and many carriers, including Asiana, had been landing for weeks on that runway without difficulty, the official said. Air traffic control tapes indicate that the controller cleared the plane for a visual approach, for which the system was not necessary.
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.” Still, some experts said that pilots often have little opportunity to practice landings without the aid of such technology, particularly on international flights into large, technologically advanced airports like San Francisco International.
“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. Kirk Koenig, a pilot with a major American carrier, said that before flying into San Francisco International last week, he could not remember the last time he had made a purely visual landing.
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. “You don’t always need it,” he said, referring to the instrument landing system. “But it’s a nice little aid to know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
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. Several dozen people remain at hospitals, though many have been discharged. On Sunday, there were still 19 patients at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, down from a high of 53 on Saturday. Of those, six, including one child, are critically injured, said 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. The force of the crash fractured the spines of several passengers, causing paralysis in some cases, Dr. Margaret Knudson, the hospital’s chief surgeon, said at a news conference. Others, she said, had severe road rash as if they had been dragged. She said doctors had expected to see burns, but that there were few.
Doctors also saw patients with fractures of their long bones and blunt-force injuries to the head and abdomen. Of the patients who could speak, she said, all said that they were in the back of the plane when it crashed.
Some patients had been discharged, but the hospital provided no details.
The 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 plane “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.

Norimitsu Onishi reported from San Francisco, and Ravi Somaiya from New York. Reporting was contributed by Vindu Goel, John Markoff and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco; Christopher Drew, Jad Mouawad, Marc Santora and Michael Schwirtz from New York; Matthew L. Wald from Washington; and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea. Susan Beachy, Shi Da and Stephanie Yang contributed research.

Norimitsu Onishi reported from San Francisco, and Ravi Somaiya from New York. Reporting was contributed by Vindu Goel, John Markoff and Somini Sengupta from San Francisco; Christopher Drew, Jad Mouawad, Marc Santora and Michael Schwirtz from New York; Matthew L. Wald from Washington; and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea. Susan Beachy, Shi Da and Stephanie Yang contributed research.