Asiana Airlines Flight 214

Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a flight from Incheon International Airport near Seoul, South Korea to San Francisco International Airport in the United States. On the morning of July 6, 2013, the Boeing 777-200ER crashed on final approach into San Francisco International Airport. Of the 307 people on board, three died; another 187 were injured, 49 of them seriously. Among the injured were four 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 fatal crash of a Boeing 777 since that aircraft type entered service in 1995.

Pilots
Captain Lee Jeong-min (Korean: 이정민; Hanja: 李鄭閔), age 49, in the right seat (co-pilot position) filled the dual role of a check / instructor captain and pilot in command, responsible for the safe operation of the flight.[29] He had 12,387 hours of flying experience of which 3,220 hours were in a 777. This was his first flight as an instructor. Captain Lee Kang-kook (이강국; 李江鞠; variant Lee Gang-guk), age 45, in the left seat (captain's position) was the pilot receiving his initial operating experience (IOE) training and was halfway through Asiana's IOE requirements. He had 9,793 hours of flying experience, of which 43 were in a 777 over nine flights, and was operating the controls under the supervision of the instructor in the right seat. Captain Lee Jong-joo (이종주; 李江鞠), age 52, who had been also in the cockpit, only suffered minor injuries. First officer Bong Dong-won (봉동원; 棒動員), age 41, who had been also in the cockpit, received medical treatment for a cracked rib; none of the other pilots needed hospital care.

Background
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 crashed short of runway 28L's threshold. The landing gear and then the tail struck the seawall that projects into San Francisco Bay. The left engine and the tail section separated from the aircraft. 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" to protect the wing fuel tank structure. 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 the 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. Despite damage to the aircraft, "many ... were able to walk away on their own." The slides for the first and second doors on the right side of the aircraft (doors 1R and 2R) deployed inside the aircraft during the crash, 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.

This was the third fatal crash in Asiana's 25-year history.