Asiana Airlines flight crashes at San Francisco airport

2 dead, 181 hospitalized after S. Korean jet crash-lands in San Francisco By Del Quentin Wilber, Ashley Halsey III and Lori Aratani   Asiana Airlines flight crashes at San Francisco airport: At least two are dead in the crash. SAN FRANCISCO - At least two passengers were killed and scores were injured Saturday after a Boeing 777 airliner arriving from South Korea crash-landed and caught fire on the runway at San Francisco International Airport, authorities said. Airport spokesman Doug Yakel said 181 of the 307 passengers and crew were taken to hospitals, and several were reported in critical condition. The crash was the first large plane to go down in U.S. airspace since November 2001, when an American Airlines Airbus A300 crashed on takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 260 people aboard as well as five people on the ground. In Saturday’s crash in San Francisco, passengers described a normal approach that was punctuated by a sudden acceleration of the engines just as they expected the wheels to touch down. That conformed with the observation of witnesses who said the plane struggled to reach the beginning of the runway. After the landing, the red-and-white jet was scorched from the cockpit area to just behind the wings, the aluminum skin peeled from the top of the aircraft. Emergency escape slides were deployed from the doorways, and some people who had been on board were seen moving away from the aircraft. Just after the Asiana Airlines plane crash-landed, airport tower personnel could be heard talking with the cockpit crew, with a controller saying: “Emergency vehicles are responding. Everyone is on their way.” The tower also heard from the pilots of a United Airlines flight awaiting takeoff, with one pilot saying, “We can see people ... and they are alive and walking around.” A second pilot said, “Between the runways we can see two or three people, and they are moving and have survived.” The airline said Flight 214 originated in Shanghai, flew to Seoul and then took off for California. Among the passengers were 61 from the United States, 77 from South Korea and 114 from China. Witnesses said that the plane’s tail struck the ground first and that the aircraft braked suddenly and spun around. They said the seven-year-old plane did not appear to catch fire until it came to a halt. “It .... hit the ground,” said a teenage boy who said he was aboard the flight. “The top just totally collapsed on top of a lot of people.” The boy spoke to reporters outside a holding area for family members and some passengers. Airport personnel whisked the boy away in the midst of his account. Ben Narasin, a writer who lives south of San Francisco, said he spoke with a pilot who described watching the plane come in “at an exceptionally high rate of descent - not of speed - and the nose was up extremely high.” “It snapped off the tail ... did not cartwheel. ... He didn’t put it down,” Narasin added. The crash closed San Francisco International Airport for hours, with many flights diverted to Los Angeles on a busy post-holiday weekend. The WashingtonPost