SAN FRANCISCO, July 7: Police officers threw utility knives up to crew members inside the burning wreckage of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 so they could cut away passengers’ seat belts. Passengers jumped down emergency slides, escaping from thick billowing smoke. And amid the chaos, some urged fellow passengers to keep calm, even as flames tore through the Boeing 777’s fuselage.

As investigators try to determine what caused the crash of Flight 214 that killed two passengers on Saturday at San Francisco International Airport, the accident left many wondering how 307 people aboard were able to make it out alive.

“It’s miraculous we survived,” said passenger Vedpal Singh, who had a fractured collarbone and whose arm was in a sling.
Investigators took the flight data recorder to Washington, D.C., overnight to begin examining its contents for clues to the last moments of the flight, officials said. They also plan to interview the pilots, the crew and passengers.

“I think we’re very thankful that the numbers were not worse when it came to fatalities and injuries,” said National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah Hersman on NBC’s “Meet the Press” programme on Sunday. “It could have been much worse.” While authorities have said very little about the investigation at this early stage, clues have emerged in witness accounts of the planes approach and video of the wreckage, leading one aviation expert to say the aircraft may have approached the runway too low.

Mike Barr, a former military pilot and accident investigator who teaches aviation safety at the University of Southern California, said it appeared that something on the plane in its low approach may have caught the runway lip — the seawall at the foot of the runway. San Francisco is one of several airports around the country that border bodies of water that have walls at the end of their runways to prevent planes that overrun a runway from ending up in the water.

Since the plane was about to land, its landing gear would have already been down, Mr Barr said. It’s possible the landing gear or the tail of the plane hit the seawall, he said. If that happened, it would effectively slam the plane into the runway, he said.

Noting that some witnesses reported hearing the plane’s engines rev up just before the crash, Mr Barr said that would be consistent with a pilot who realised at the last minute that the plane was too low and was increasing power to the engines to try to increase altitude.

Mr Barr said he could think of no reason why a plane would come in to land that low.

“When you heard that explosion, that loud boom and you saw the black smoke ... you just thought, my god, everybody in there is gone,” said Ki Siadatan, who lives a few miles away from the airport and watched the plane’s ‘wobbly’ and “a little bit out of control” approach from his balcony.

“My initial reaction was I don’t see how anyone could have made it,” he said. Inside the plane, Mr Singh, who was sitting in the middle of the aircraft with his family, said there was no forewarning from the pilot or any crew members before the plane touched down hard and he heard a loud sound.

“We knew something was horrible wrong,” said a visibly shaken Mr Singh. He said the plane went silent before people tried to get out anyway they could. His 15-year-old son said luggage tumbled from the overhead bins.

Passenger Benjamin Levy said it looked to him that the plane was flying too low and too close to the bay as it approached the runway. Mr Levy, who was sitting in an emergency exit row, said he felt the pilot try to lift the jet up before it crashed.

He said he thought the manoeuvre might have saved some lives. “Everybody was screaming. I was trying to usher them out,” he recalled of the first seconds after the landing. “I said: ‘Stay calm, stop screaming, help each other out, don’t push’.”

By the time the flames were out, much of the top of the fuselage had burned away.

The tail section was gone, with pieces of it scattered across the beginning of the runway. One engine appeared to have broken away. The flight originated in Shanghai, China, and stopped over in Seoul, South Korea, before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco, airport officials said. The airline said there were 16 crew members aboard and 291 passengers. Thirty of the passengers were children.

San Francisco Fire Department chief Joanne Hayes-White said the two who died were found outside of the plane. “Having surveyed that area, we’re lucky that there hasn’t been a greater loss,” she said.

Airport spokesman Doug Yakel said 49 people were critically injured and 132 had less significant injuries.—AP

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