Asiana Airlines flight 214, carrying 291 passengers and 16 crew members, crashed during landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday, killing two Chinese nationals. The Boeing 777 was flying from Seoul via Shanghai.
The Los Angeles Times has a breakdown of the nationality of those onboard:
John Martin, director of the San Francisco airport, provided a breakdown of passengers’ nationality: 77 South Koreans, 141 Chinese, 61 with U.S. citizenship, one Japanese and 11 from other countries.
Officials from the Chinese Consulate were visiting Bay Area hospitals to learn what they could about the condition of Chinese citizens on board, said Wang Chuan, a spokesman for the consulate.
“We are trying our best to help them,” Wang said.
UPDATE, 11:51 pm: The two deceased have been identified as 16-year-olds Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, students at Jiangshan Middle School in Zhejiang province, reports SCMP.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, though initial reports suggest the pilot simply overshot undershot the runway.
UPDATE, 10:57 pm: A technology that helps pilots avoid missing runways was not turned on, reports Reuters:
Glide Path is a computerized system based at an airport that calculates a plane’s path of descent and sends it to pilots in real time.
San Francisco International has turned off the system for nearly the entire summer on the runway where the Asiana flight crashed, according to a notice from the airport on the Federal Aviation Administration’s Web site. It showed the system out of service June 1-August 22 on runway 28 Left.
Kevin Hiatt, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation and a former Delta pilot, said it was common for airports to take instrument landing systems offline for maintenance on clear days. Pilots use several other instruments and visual cues to land in clear conditions, Hiatt said.
“All of those are more than adequate to fly an aircraft down for a successful landing on the runway,” he said.
Really very strange. Pilot had 17 yrs of experience and puts the plane down short of the runway. Passengers said they could see the sea level just 10 ft below. Scary stuff, but amazing that so many walked away from this!
my condolences to the family.