Aviation News

(CNN) – Asiana Airlines Flight 214 passenger Ye Mengyuan was alive when flung from the plane during this month’s crash landing but was killed moments later when run over by a rescue vehicle, a California coroner said Friday.

Ye died as result of “multiple blunt injuries that are consistent with being run over by a motor vehicle,” said San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault. “Those injuries she received, she was alive at the time.”

Officials previously had said that was what they feared had happened after the crash on July 6 at San Francisco’s airport.

Ye, 16, of China was one of three people who died in the crash and its aftermath.

San Francisco Fire Department Chief Joanne Hayes-White, attending a news conference with Foucrault, called the incident “a tragic accident” and apologized to Ye’s family.

One of the department’s aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicles struck the girl while she was on the ground, possibly covered with firefighting foam being sprayed on and around the burning plane, the chief said.

“I particularly want to express our condolences and apologies to the family of Ye Mengyuan in light of the coroners’ findings (in) this tragic accident,” the chief said.

“Obviously this is very difficult news for us. We’re heartbroken. We’re in the business of saving lives,” she added. “There’s not a lot of words to describe how badly we feel about it.”

The fire department is reaching out to the family through the Chinese consulate’s office.

The investigation of what happened after the crash remains with the city’s police department.

Police are reconstructing the crash scene to ascertain what happened during the rescue, the chief said. She called the crash “a difficult, challenging scene.”

“We believe it was one of the specialized rigs at the airport, the ARFF rigs, aircraft rescue firefighting vehicles,” Hayes-White said.

San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee said he was “profoundly saddened by the involvement of a responding emergency vehicle in the death of 16-year-old Ye Mengyuan.”

“On behalf of the people of San Francisco, I offer my deepest condolences and regret for her tragic death, and the deaths of her close friend, Wang Linjia, and 15-year-old Liu Yipeng,” the mayor said in a statement.

Ye and Wang, also 16, were part of a group of 35 teachers and students from a middle school in Jiangshan traveling to California for a summer camp program.

Wang was found dead at the scene along with Ye. Liu died days later in a San Francisco hospital.

Foucrault, the coroner, met with the three families Thursday to discuss his findings, the fire chief said.

The mayor said firefighters and first responders helped save the lives of 304 of the 307 passengers and crew aboard the flight.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash landing, which also injured more than 180 people aboard the flight.

READ MORE: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/19/travel/asiana-airlines-crash

For more interesting articles to help you improve your Aviation English please visit http://aviationenglish.com and LIKE our Facebook Pagea

After a look at the battered wreckage of Asiana Airlines (020560:KS) Flight 214 strewn along Runway 28L at San Francisco International Airport, most observers might assume the worst had happened. The tail section had been torn from the widebody Boeing (BA) 777 during an ill-fated landing. One of the huge engines was ripped from the aircraft’s wings. And a gaping gash atop the fuselage revealed a fire-gutted interior from the conflagration that engulfed the airliner soon after it came to rest next to the tarmac. Yet only two of the 307 passengers and crew on board the jumbo jet died in the July 6 crash. Thanks to near-empty fuel tanks, design enhancements that helped keep its aluminum body largely whole, and scores of safety modifications adopted since the 1980s, the crash landing of Flight 214 became primarily a story of survivability instead of disaster.

“This crash shows how the plane really did its job,” says Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at the Teal Group consulting firm. “The fuselage stayed intact and kept almost everyone alive even after such a violent landing.” Adds Richard Healing, a former National Transportation Safety Board member who now runs Washington-based R Cubed Consulting: “This was a phenomenally survivable accident.”

Although investigators could take months to understand the wreck fully, the low loss of life suggests that advances such as more-resilient aluminum hulls and continuing efforts to forestall onboard fires are having an impact. “Aircraft are generally more crashworthy now than they were,” says Paul Hayes, director of air safety at aviation consulting firm Ascend.

Fatal plane crashes remain rare. According to Ascend, about 9.9 million air passengers were carried for every one that lost his or her life in a crash in 2012. That’s a 20 percent improvement from 2011. The passenger fatality rate for the last five years is one per 6.1 million; in the 1990s, it was one per 1.8 million. “We took a very safe industry and made it even safer,” says consultant Robert Mann. “The problem is when you get down to these vanishingly low accident rates, the space to improve decreases.”

Designing more crash-proof planes has meant studying previous tragedies, or what industry experts bluntly call tombstoning. “As far as seeing how crashworthy is an airplane, all the computer modeling isn’t as good as having an actual crash,” says Hans Weber, president of consultant Tecop International.

Such research led the Federal Aviation Administration in 1988 to mandate that newly developed aircraft have passenger seats that can withstand 16 times the force of gravity, up from the previous standard of nine times. “These new 16G seats stay firmly bolted into the floor system, whereas in the past the seats would break free and pancake into each other and cause fatalities,” says Kevin Hiatt, a former Delta Air Lines (DAL) pilot who is chief executive officer of the Flight Safety Foundation.

Past accidents also prompted the FAA and European Aviation Safety Agency to require that manufacturers design their planes to allow for 90-second evacuations even if half the emergency exits are blocked. Airbus’s (EAD:FP) mammoth A380 double-decker widebody passed that test in 2006, when 873 occupants were removed in 80 seconds. (The only injury was a broken leg.) Modern aircraft also are required to have nonflammable material for seat cushions, carpet, walls, and other interior parts. Insulation blankets in aircraft walls are designed to slow the spread of flames. That protection, plus the jet’s skin, can provide at least four minutes for evacuation before a fuel-fed post-crash fire can burn through the interior of the passenger cabin, according to Boeing.

“Thirty years ago there were survivable accidents but people died in the post-crash fire,” says Steve Wallace, former head of the FAA’s accident investigation office. “The cabin interior materials are vastly improved now, and rules were rewritten around getting precious more seconds to get everybody out of that airplane.”

In the Asiana crash, Bill Waldock, a professor who teaches crash investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, says investigators and aircraft designers will review the way the 777’s tail, which is made of composites, broke off whereas the aluminum alloy fuselage (the central body of the plane that carries most of the passengers and crew) stayed intact. “They’ll be looking at the crashworthiness aspects of it,” Waldock says, “what helped so many people survive and where the weak spots were.”

China’s major airports have the worst flight delays in the world, a report from travel industry monitor FlightStats says.

According to figures from around the world in June, Beijing and Shanghai airports came bottom for on-time flights, the US-based firm said.

Eight of the 10 worst-performing Asian airlines in terms of delays were Chinese carriers, the report added.

The report did not explain the reasons for poor performance.

The report looked at “on-time performance of scheduled passenger flights” by top airlines, as well as “top performing airports based on their reported departure performance” in June, FlightStats said on its website.

“A flight is considered on-time if it arrives or departs within 15 minutes after its scheduled take-off or landing time,” the report says.

Among 35 major international airports, the report ranked Beijing Capital International Airport lowest for on-time performance.

It figure for on-time departures was 18.30%, with 42.02% of flights falling under the “excessive” category – a delay of 45 minutes or more.

This means that only a fifth of the flights left on time and close to half of flights were delayed for 45 minutes or more.

The Shanghai Pudong International Airport, second from bottom, fared slightly better, with on-time flight departures at 28.72%. Under the “excessive” category, it scored 34.22%.

Tokyo’s Haneda airport topped the list, with an on-time performance of 95.04%. Osaka International Airport, which did not feature in the main list but in a separate Asian ranking, did even better with 95.88%.

Meanwhile, China United Airlines was ranked the worst-performing among the 41 Asian airlines listed on the report, with just over a quarter of its flight performing on time.

The Asian airline with the best on-time rate was South Korea’s Air Busan, with a near-perfect 96.77%.

Some Chinese industry insiders blame “air traffic volume as the cause of flight delays”, China Daily newspaper said. In China, about 80% of air space is restricted to military use, the paper said.

But it also quoted an expert as saying that China’s airports could not keep up with commercial airline growth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23282724

For more interesting articles to help you improve your Aviation English please visit http://aviationenglish.com and LIKE our Facebook Page

Two flight attendants on the Asiana Airlines plane that crash-landed were sucked from the plane and thrown down the runway upon impact, crash investigators said today.

“Two flight attendants were ejected from the aircraft during the impact sequence so they were not at their stations when the aircraft came to rest,” National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said at a news conference this evening.

“They were found down the runway and off to the side of the runway,” she said. “Those flight attendants survived, but they obviously had gone through a serious event and have injuries.”

Hersman also said that, according to interviews with crew members, the plane was “sent into a 360 degree spin” when it crash landed.

Of the three pilots in the cockpit at the time of the crash, the first officer was hospitalized and released with a cracked rib and the other two were not admitted to a hospital.

Hersman said that the pilot flying in the left seat was about halfway through his initial operating experience on the Boeing 777. He was experienced on other types of aircrafts.

The instructor pilot in the right seat “reported that this was his first trip as an instructor pilot,” Hersman said. It was the first time the two had flown together.

Meanwhile, the camp that the two teenage girls who died in the crash were supposed to attend with a group of 35 Chinese students and chaperones has been canceled in wake of the crash.

The group was on its way to a three-week summer camp at West Valley Christian Church in Los Angeles. They were going to stay with host families, study English, sight-see, visit universities and explore career opportunities.

“These are amazing, amazing gifted, talented, great prospects with a lot of talent that are coming over here,” West Valley Christian School administrator Derek Swales told ABCNews.com today. “It’s just devastating to think that superstar kid in the classroom with all that potential was just taken.”

The two fatalities were identified as Wang Linjia and Ye Mengyuan, both 16 and students from China. The students had been in the rear of the aircraft, where many of the most seriously injured passengers were seated, NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said.

Swales said the camp session has been canceled and the remaining students and chaperones are expected to return to China. He does not know if three other scheduled camp sessions with groups from Asia will go on.

The school is planning a vigil and is collecting money that they say will be sent with care packages directly to the families involved.

Meanwhile, why the crash occurred and who is to blame are the focuses of the safety investigation. The National Transportation Safety Board has been meeting with the four pilots of the Asiana Airlines jet that crash-landed at San Francisco Intentional Airport Saturday.

The NTSB is expected to provide more information on the pilots at a news conference later today.

Federal investigators have yet to indicate whether the crash can be attributed to pilot error, while they continue to analyze data recovered from the plane’s black boxes.

Investigators have said Flight 214 was flying “significantly below” its target speed during approach when the crew tried to abort the landing just before the plane smashed onto the runway.

The investigation into the cause of the crash has noted that the pilot in charge of the flight was in his ninth training flight on the Boeing 777 and was 11 flights short of the worldwide standard to get licensed, according to company officials.

Pilot Lee Kang-kook had 43 hours of flight experience on the Boeing 777 and Saturday was his first time landing at the airport with that kind of aircraft, Asiana Airlines spokeswoman Lee Hyo-min said Monday at a news conference in Seoul, South Korea.

As authorities continue to investigate the Asiana flight, a Japan Airlines Boeing 777 en route to San Francisco early this morning had to return to Tokyo’s Haneda airport after a warning flashed in the cockpit saying the jet’s hydraulic fluid level was low, according to the airliner.

The plane, carrying 226 passengers, returned without incident.

The parents of the two Chinese teens killed in Saturday’s crash arrived overnight at San Francisco International Airport. An investigation is underway to determine whether one of the two dead girls might have been hit by a rescue vehicle in the chaos after the plane crash-landed.

Hersman said investigators watched airport surveillance video Monday to determine whether an emergency vehicle hit one of the students. But they have not reached any firm conclusions. A coroner said he would need at least two weeks to rule in the matter.

Thirty-seven patients remain hospitalized at San Francisco area hospitals with eight still in critical condition.

For more interesting articles to help you improve your Aviation English please visit http://aviationenglish.com and LIKE our Facebook Page