The airline said there were 16 crew members aboard and 291 passengers. The flight originated in Shanghai, China, and stopped over in Seoul, South Korea, before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco, airport officials said. The tail section was gone, with pieces of it scattered across the beginning of the runway. Unhurt, she carried him through the hole where the bathroom was and went out onto the tarmac.īy the time the flames were out, much of the top of the fuselage had burned away. Zhang picked up her 4-year-old son, who had hit the seat in front of him and broke his leg. Baggage was falling around her, people were screaming and the aisle window broke. Wen Zhang said she could feel the plane's tail hit the ground. 'I said: `Stay calm, stop screaming, help each other out, don't push.'' I was trying to usher them out,' he recalled of the first seconds after the landing. He said he thought the maneuver might have saved some lives. Levy, who was sitting in an emergency exit row, said he felt the pilot try to lift the jet up before it crashed. Passenger Benjamin Levy said it looked to him that the plane was flying too low and too close to the bay as it approached the runway. His 15-year-old son said luggage tumbled from the overhead bins. He said the plane went silent before people tried to get out anyway they could. 'We knew something was horrible wrong,' said a visibly shaken Singh. Since the crash, clues have emerged in witness accounts of the planes approach and video of the wreckage, leading one aviation expert to say the aircraft may have approached the runway too low and something may have caught the runway lip - part of a seawall at the foot of the runway. She says investigators will be 'taking a look at it all.' Hersman told CBS' 'Face the Nation' that there were many other navigation tools available to help pilots land.

She said pilots were sent a notice warning that the glide slope wasn't available. She said the glide slope - a ground-based aid that helps pilots stay on course while landing - had been shut down since June. Hersman said investigators are looking into what role the shutdown of a key navigational aid may have played in the crash. 'I think we're very thankful that the numbers were not worse when it came to fatalities and injuries,' said National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah Hersman on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday.

They also plan to interview the pilots, the crew and passengers. Investigators took the flight data recorder to Washington, D.C., overnight to begin examining its contents for clues to the last moments of the flight, officials said. 'It's miraculous we survived,' said passenger Vedpal Singh, who had a fractured collarbone and whose arm was in a sling.

Boeing 777 x plane 11 ctd