BREAKING Asiana Flight 214 Crashes at SFO (Boeing 777)

[FSTargetDrone]

CNN.

The aircraft has burned and lost its tail in the crash, but seems otherwise intact. The roof above the passenger compartment is mostly burned away. The tail seems to have broken just aft of the pressure bulkhead. The flight was from Inchon to SFO. People on the flight have been sending Twitter messages from the crash site after they used the escape slides, so there are some survivors.

It left the runway during the landing according to a witness in a hotel overlooking the runway. The main gear may have collapsed on landing.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Here's a video shot by someone in the terminal:

Linka. The aircraft was previously reported to be completely engulfed, but that clearly happened later as you can see the main part of the fuselage intact and not-engulfed with the evacuation slides deployed, so we may hope that the number of survivors is in fact high.

[FSTargetDrone]

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Some are reporting that the tail broke off on final approach (an emergency had been previously declared) right over the water (the runway starts right up against the bay), which is where the tail is--in the drink--and the airplane was close enough to landing at that point that it went down mostly intact and, having come in from Taipei, with little fuel aboard, on the surface of the airfield subsequent to the loss of the tail. But that's uncomfirmed at this early stage.

[FSTargetDrone]

That could be what is shown here (at very long range):



Picture apparently taken by someone who escaped. Note the roof is still intact here:

[RogueIce]

This tweet from someone on the plane says "most everyone seems fine" is good news. Also has a ground level picture of the plane from close by. Looks like a good number of people walking away, which is a good sign.

[FSTargetDrone]

[MrDakka]

Fatigue cracks?

[FSTargetDrone]

Fatigue cracks?

The aircraft is reportedly a Boeing 777-200ER built in 2006.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The evacuation was clearly relatively orderly and from looking at that picture and the lack of injuries in people turning around to take cellphone pictures that I think we can hope that most aboard survived.

[TimothyC]

It looks like the elevators are on the runway, and you've got a long string of debris.

[FSTargetDrone]

Tail number: HL7742

[FSTargetDrone]

Up until today, there have been zero passenger fatalities as a result of accidents involving the Boeing 777. Let's hope that streak continues.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

You can clearly see the aft pressure bulkhead intact where the tail section severed, so the passenger compartment was not compromised by the structural failure, only by the subsequent fire after she was already down. That substantially increases the likelihood of all aboard having evacuated.

[Terralthra]

According to local news (I live in SF), everyone has been evacuated safely, with no serious injuries.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

There's an image of the tail strike -- it occurred on the runway breakwater, so it wasn't during landing -- the aircraft was actually flying nose-up so close to the water that the 6 - 9 foot elevation difference between San Francisco bay and the runway surface was enough to cause a catastrophic impact, or so that would be my assessment. The way the damage begins instantaneously with the riprap suggests the tail was barely out of the water when it struck the riprap of the breakwater and they had probably already been flying in that position.



Further evidence is because instead of breaking off due to a single impact, or disintegrating due to that impact in place, the tail progressively disintegrated as the plane went down the runway, scattering the empennage intact while more or less "chewing" the tail fuselage to tiny fragments. Less of a slap and more of a grinding collision that occurred until the aircraft lost lift and bellied out on the airport surface.

Limited informed speculation only, of course.

[Alyeska]

Those images don't work Duchess

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Those images don't work Duchess

They work for me. Let me send them to someone who has a free image host service.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

First picture:



Second picture:

[Alyeska]

Holy shit. Yeah, thats a tail strike. Which leads me to believe whatever the emergency was was related to why they landed the way they did.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

There are actually reports now that the aircraft did flare before landing and that there are debris in the water. I actually don't think it was a tail strike in the conventional sense of a tail strike during landing flare (which apparently didn't happen at all) ; rather, I think they were already so low off the water that in a slightly nose-up position the tail struck the riprap of the breakwater and the aircraft lost forward progress and fell to the runway. Debris in the water would come from the tail's impact with the riprap and the explosion was the APU running being slammed into rocks at a few hundred miles per hour.

But that's still speculation. It does however suggest something was wrong before landing: They were unable to gain altitude for landing and were coming in almost touching the surface of San Francisco Bay.

[Terralthra]

News now reporting 2 dead, 61 injured. Not sure how many are serious.

[MrDakka]

Hitting that riprap with the tail must have been one hell of thump for the passengers. Still begs the question what happened for the airplane to crash in the first place.

[Broomstick]

Initial reports are that it was coming in VERY nose high

I expect we'll get more info in the next 24-48 hours, the immediate concern was, of course, putting out the fire and accounting for people/treating injured.

Did the black boxes get scraped off into the debris fields or did they stay with the main fuselage? And if the former, have they been found yet?

[JME2]

This is on all the major networks here.

I've flown out of SFO, so it's just..unbelievable.