SAN FRANCISCO — A county coroner said Sunday that his office is conducting an autopsy to determine whether one of the victims of the Asiana Airlines crash at San Francisco International Airport was run over and killed by an emergency vehicle.
San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said senior San Francisco Fire Department officials notified him and his staff at the crash site Saturday that one of the two 16-year-old Chinese girls who died from the crash may have been struck on the runaway.
“We were made aware of the possibility at the scene that day,” Foucrault said, adding that he did not get a thorough look at the victims on Saturday to know whether they had external injuries.
One of the bodies was found on the runway near where the plane’s tail broke off upon impact, he said. The other was found on the left side of the aircraft about 30 feet away from where the Boeing 777 came to rest after it skidded down the tarmac. It was not far from an emergency slide.
San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White did not return telephone calls seeking comment. Earlier Sunday, Hayes-White had said she did not know whether the two dead girls were alive when her crews arrived on scene.
But she told the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday that the girl found on the side of the airplane had injuries consistent with having been run over.
“As it possibly could have happened, based on the injuries sustained, it could have been one of our vehicles that added to the injuries, or another vehicle,” she told the Chronicle. “That could have been something that happened in the chaos. It will be part of our investigation.”
Foucrault said the autopsy, which he expects to be completed by Monday, will involve determining whether the girl’s death was caused by injuries from the crash or “a secondary incident.”
The teenagers’ families are expected to arrive in San Francisco on Monday, and they will receive the autopsy results before they are made public, he said.
The coroner said both girls were pronounced dead at the airport.
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Chinese government media and Asiana Airlines have identified the girls as Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, students at Jiangshan Middle School in Zhejiang, an affluent coastal province in eastern China. They were part of a group of 29 students and five teachers from the school who were heading to summer camps in California, according to education authorities in China.
At San Francisco General Hospital on Sunday, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee called the questions being raised about a rescue vehicle possibly striking one of the victims “unsubstantiated.”“It was very, very hectic when they arrived minutes after the plane came to rest and there was smoke coming out, and people were trying to get out as quickly as they could,” Lee said.
Altogether, 305 of the 307 people aboard made it out alive in what survivors and rescuers described as nothing less than astonishing after a frightful scene of fire burning inside the fuselage, pieces of the aircraft scattered across the runway and people fleeing for their lives.
Survivors relive ordeal
As Flight 214 was coming in low over San Francisco Bay, Fei Xiong and her 8-year-old son looked at each other, sensing something was wrong.“My son told me, ‘The plane will fall down; it’s too close to the sea.’ I told him ‘No, baby, it’s OK. We’ll be fine.’ And then the plane just fell down,” Xiong said Sunday. She had been wearing a neck brace.
Within moments, the aircraft was hurtling out of control, its rear portion ripped off. Baggage was tumbling from the overhead bins onto passengers, dust filled the plane’s carcass, and the oxygen masks had dropped down. People all around her were screaming.
Xiong, who is from China, was sitting in the middle of the plane when she felt the strong jolt and her neck flung back and forth violently.
After the plane came to a rest, she grabbed her son and headed for the nearest door, which was open. She said the emergency chute had not deployed, so they jumped to the tarmac.
Behind her, near the rear of the aircraft in seat 40C, Wen Zhang said she thought the landing gear had failed when she felt the tail slam against the ground. She, too, was with her young son, 4.
“I had no time to be scared,” she said.
Zhang picked up her child, who had hit the seat in front of him and broke his left leg. Unhurt, she could see a hole that ripped open at the back of the jumbo jet where the bathroom had been and carried her son to safety.
“It left a hole very close to my seat,” she said. “Enough for two persons to get out.”
Sitting near Zhang was 39-year-old Shi Da, who was traveling with his wife and teenage son.
He was shocked by the violent shaking of the crash, then the realization that the back of the plane had ripped off. He stood up and could see the tail, but the kitchen was missing with nothing but a hole, he said.
“I can see through the hole to see the runway and the ground,” he said. “So we just grabbed our bags and rushed out from the tail, from the hole.”The passengers who made it out alive sat on the tarmac for half an hour waiting for buses and watching the aircraft go up in flames as firefighters hosed it down. Ambulances took the badly injured away, but 123 people walked away with little injury.
Many didn’t have their passports, cellphones or money. Da’s friend picked up him and his family up, took them out to dinner, then they went to a Target store to buy clothes because their luggage is missing, presumed destroyed.
Most survivors suffered minor injuries, and were just starting to realize how close they’d come to death.“I just feel lucky.” Da said. “We are so lucky.”
Details about crash emerge
Pilots of Asiana Flight 214 were flying too slowly as they approached San Francisco airport, triggering a control board warning that the jetliner could stall, and then tried to abort the landing seconds before crashing, according to federal safety officials.The Boeing 777 was traveling at speeds well below the target landing speed of 137 knots per hour, or 157 m.p.h., said National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah Hersman at a briefing Sunday on the crash.
“We’re not talking about a few knots,” she said.
Hersman said the aircraft’s stick shaker — a piece of safety equipment that warns pilots of an impending stall — went off moments before the crash. The normal response to a stall warning is to increase speed to recover control.
There was an increase several seconds before the crash, she said, basing her comments on an evaluation of the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that contain hundreds of different types of information on what happened to the plane.
And at 1.5 seconds before impact, there was a call for an aborted landing, she said.
Pilots normally try to land at the target speed, in this case 137 knots, plus five knots, said Bob Coffman, an American Airlines captain who has flown 777s. He said the briefing raises an important question: “Why was the plane going so slow?”
The plane's Pratt & Whitney engines were on idle, Hersman said. The normal procedure in the Boeing 777, a wide-body jet, would be to use the autopilot and the throttle to provide power to the engine all the way through to landing, Coffman said.
There was no indication in the discussions between the pilots and the air-traffic controllers that there were problems with the aircraft.
Among the questions investigators are trying to answer was what, if any, role the deactivation of a ground-based landing guidance system played in the crash. Such systems help pilots land, especially at airports like San Francisco where fog can make landing challenging. AUDIO
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