Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a scheduled transpacific passenger flight from Incheon International Airport near Seoul, South Korea, to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in the United States. On the morning of Saturday, July 6, 2013, the Boeing 777-200ER aircraft operating the flight crashed on final approach into SFO. Of the 307 people aboard, two passengers died at the crash scene, and a third died in a hospital several days later, all three of them teenage Chinese girls. Another 187 individuals were injured, 49 of them seriously.[1]:13 Among the injured were three flight attendants who were thrown onto the runway while still strapped in their seats when the tail section broke off after striking the seawall short of the runway. It was the first crash of a Boeing 777 that resulted in fatalities since that aircraft model entered into service in 1995. Aircraft HL7742, the aircraft involved in the accident, pictured at San Francisco International Airport 43 days prior to the accident. The aircraft at San Francisco International Airport a day after the crash. The Boeing 777-200ER, registration HL7742, was powered by two Pratt and Whitney PW4090 engines. It was delivered new to Asiana Airlines in March 2006 and at the time of the crash had accumulated 36,000 flight hours and 5,000 (takeoff-and-landing) cycles. The Boeing 777 has a good reputation for safety. This was its first fatal accident, second crash (after British Airways Flight 38), and third hull loss since the 777 began operating commercially in 1995. Crash On July 6, 2013, Flight OZ214 took off from Incheon International Airport (ICN) at 5:04 p.m. KST (08:04 UTC), 34 minutes after its scheduled departure time. It was scheduled to land at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) at 11:04 a.m. PDT (18:04 UTC). The flight was cleared for a visual approach to runway 28L at 11:21 a.m. PDT, and told to maintain a speed of 180 knots (330 km/h; 210 mph) until the aircraft was 5 miles (8.0 km) from the runway. At 11:26 a.m., Northern California TRACON ("NorCal Approach") passed air traffic control to the San Francisco tower. A tower controller acknowledged the second call from the crew at 11:27 a.m. when the plane was 1.5 miles (2.4 km) away, and gave clearance to land. The weather was very good; the latest METAR reported light wind, 10 miles (16 km) visibility (the maximum it can report), no precipitation, and no forecast or reports of wind shear. The pilots performed a visual approach assisted by the runway's precision approach path indicator (PAPI). At 11:28 a.m., HL7742[2] crashed short of runway 28L's threshold. The landing gear and then the tail struck the seawall that projects into San Francisco Bay.[11][14][15] Both engines and the tail section separated from the aircraft.[16] The NTSB noted that the main landing gear, the first part of the aircraft to hit the seawall, "separated cleanly from [the] aircraft as designed". The vertical and both horizontal stabilizers fell on the runway before the threshold. The remainder of the fuselage and wings rotated counter-clockwise approximately 330 degrees, as it slid westward. Video showed it pivoting about a wing and the nose while sharply inclined to the ground. It came to rest to the left of the runway, 2,400 feet (730 m) from the initial point of impact at the seawall. After a minute or so, a dark plume of smoke was observed rising from the wreckage. The fire was traced to a ruptured oil tank above the right engine. The leaking oil fell onto the hot engine and ignited. The fire was not fed by jet fuel. Two evacuation slides were deployed on the left side of the airliner and used for evacuation.[16][22] Despite damage to the aircraft, "many ... were able to walk away on their own".[23] The slides for the first and second doors on the right side of the aircraft (doors 1R and 2R) deployed inside the aircraft, pinning the flight attendants seated nearby. According to NBC reports in September 2013, the US government had been concerned about the reliability of evacuation slides for decades: "Federal safety reports and government databases reveal that the NTSB has recommended multiple improvements to escape slides and that the Federal Aviation Administration has collected thousands of complaints about them." Two months before the accident at SFO, the FAA issued an airworthiness directive ordering inspection of the slide release mechanism on certain Boeing 777 aircraft, so as to detect and correct corrosion that might interfere with slide deployment.

• published: 11 Apr 2016
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