Newly released footage of the Asiana Airlines plane that crashed four years ago at San Francisco Airport shows the dramatic moment of impact and immediate chaotic aftermath on the tarmac.
The video, which appears to have been filmed from one of the surveillance tower cameras at the California airport, shows Flight 214 approaching the runway from the south before crashing on July 6, 2013.
Huge clouds of white and black smoke quickly fill the area around the Boeing 777 that was inbound from Seoul, South Korea carrying 307 passengers and crew members.
The footage of what happened in the next few minutes after it crashed has never been seen before as it shows the utter chaos on the tarmac.
The 47-minute video clip shows rescue crews rushing to the scene on the runway as the black smoke fills the sky from the blaze on the plane. It took at least 30 seconds after a fire broke out in the plane’s cabin for a passenger evacuation to begin.
Roughly two minutes later, the inflatable slides were deployed, and passengers can be seen escaping down them before firefighters run up the slides and into the plane.
The National Transportation Safety Board said the delay was due to the pilot initially telling flight attendants not to deploy the chutes ‘as well as disorientation and confusion.’
The NTSB said the pilot wanted to first consult with the control tower before opening the doors to make sure it was safe to exit. Flight attendants initially told passengers to stay seated.
Flight attendants then ordered the plane evacuated when one noticed fire. The NTSB said the crew followed proper procedures, including the initial delay waiting for guidance from outside the plane.
‘It’s a little long,’ Al Diehl, a retired NTSB investigator, said Wednesday. ‘But the pilot may not have known he was off the runway. This guy had gone through a lot and everybody was a little bit dazed.’
The NTSB released part of the footage five months after the July 6, 2013, crash.
Hundreds of passengers, some pulling luggage, can be seen milling about on the tarmac as emergency trucks pull up and several firefighters and police scurry up the chutes into the burning plane to rescue five trapped and injured passengers.
The NTSB said only five of the plane’s 12 flight attendants were able to help with the evacuation after the crash.
Two of the flight attendants riding in the tail of the plane were seriously hurt when their section was severed from the craft on impact.
Three teenage girls died and 187 others were injured during the incident.
Two of the fatalities were sitting in the tail section of the plane, which snapped off when it hit the seawall, officials said previously.
The third fatality occurred when 16-year-old Ye Meng Yuan was run over by two rescue vehicles while she lay injured and covered in foam on the runway.
The girl’s death was caused by the rescue vehicles, the San Mateo County coroner determined.
One aviation airport believes the crew members and pilots made several errors after the crash, including that they should have checked that passengers were safe, even after they hit the ground.
‘To me it was a terrible error, they should have started the evacuation as soon as the plane came to a stop,’ airline safety consultant Captain Dick Deeds told KPIX.
‘Your job as a flight crew member is the safety of your passengers.
‘And if you have to evacuate, obviously you knew you had a crash, you start the evacuation, you get those people off.’
Federal safety investigators blamed the pilots for the crash, saying they bungled the landing approach by inadvertently deactivating the plane’s key control for airspeed, among other errors.
The plane’s landing gear struck a seawall just south of the main runway, and federal investigators also found that pilots’ error caused the airplane to approach the runway too low.
The black box aboard the Boeing 777 jetliner set out three crucial moments that show the plane was approaching the runway too slowly and that the pilots were trying to correct the problem.
Information collected from the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder indicated that there were no signs of trouble until seven seconds before impact, when the crew tried to accelerate, NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said at the time of the crash.
Airport spokesman Jon Ballesteros said the airport was aware of the release of the video, and he confirmed that it was authentic to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Ballesteros shared that the video was previously used by investigators and also as part of safety training session.
It’s unclear how the video ended up being published online.
The video was published on YouTube on June 28 by user ‘What You Haven’t Seen.’
The description says the video was taken from airport surveillance camera C225.
Oliver King is the CEO of Olivergist.com and also a social media influence, He is a graduate of Ecotes Benin University with a BSc in International Relations. And also have Dip in Law from Bayero University. Oliver King has passion for blogging and loves what he does.
