The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Two killed, many injured as S. Korean airliner crashes, burns in San Francisco
- Oil-laden freight train explodes in Canadian town, people killed
- Aircraft in U.S. crash has solid safety record
| Two killed, many injured as S. Korean airliner crashes, burns in San Francisco Posted: SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 with 307 people on board crashed and burst into flames as it landed at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday after a flight from Seoul, killing two people and sending more than 180 to local hospitals. Witnesses said the tail of the plane appeared to hit the approach area of the runway, which juts out into San Francisco Bay, as it came in for landing. The tail came off and the aircraft left a trail of debris before coming to rest beside the runway. Pictures taken by survivors immediately after the crash showed passengers emerging from the wrecked plane and hurrying away. Thick smoke then billowed from the wreckage, and TV footage later showed the fuselage of the aircraft gutted and blackened by fire. There was no immediate indication of the cause of the accident, and federal officials were travelling from Washington to investigate. One survivor said the pilot seemed to be trying to gain height just before crash. Asiana Airlines said the flight, which had originated in Shanghai, had carried 291 passengers and 16 crew members. Most were Chinese, Korean and U.S. nationals. Dale Carnes, assistant deputy chief of the San Francisco Fire Department Chief, said two people were killed in the crash, and 49 were transported immediately to area hospitals with serious injuries. Another 132 people were later taken to hospitals with moderate and minor injuries. Five people were in critical condition at San Francisco General Hospital, according to spokeswoman Rachael Kagan. She said a total of 52 people were treated for burns, fractures and internal injuries. Three people were in critical condition at Stanford Hospital. The crash was the first-ever fatal accident involving the Boeing 777, a popular long-range jet that has been in service since 1995. It was the first fatal commercial airline accident in the United States since a regional plane operated by Colgan Air crashed in New York in 2009. San Francisco International Airport, a major West Coast hub and gateway to Asia, was shut down for several hours after the crash and flights were diverted to Los Angeles, Seattle, Oakland and San Jose. By late afternoon two runways had reopened even as scores of safety workers scoured the airfield for debris. 'TOO LOW AND TOO FAST' Survivor Benjamin Levy told a local NBC station by phone that he believed the plane had been coming in too low. "I know the airport pretty well, so I realized the guy was a bit too low, too fast, and somehow he was not going to hit the runway on time, so he was too low ... he put some gas and tried to go up again," he said. "But it was too late, so we hit the runway pretty bad, and then we started going up in the air again, and then landed again, pretty hard," Levy said. He said he opened an emergency door and ushered people out. "We got pretty much everyone in the back section of the plane out," he said. "When we got out there was some smoke. There was no fire then, the fire came afterward." Photos and TV images showed that emergency chutes had been deployed from at least two of the aircraft's exits. Ying Kong of the Bay Area city of Albany, who was waiting at the airport for her brother-in-law, Fawen Yan, 47, from Richmond, California, said he telephoned her after surviving the crash to say it had been "really smoky and scary." "He feels it difficult to breathe, but he's okay," she said. She added: "He said a lot of people had to run." Asiana Airlines said the passengers included 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans, 61 U.S. citizens and one Japanese citizen. It did not give the nationality of the others. At an evening media briefing, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said: "It is incredible and very lucky that we have so many survivors." INVESTIGATION UNDERWAY The Asiana flight departed from Seoul at 5:04 p.m. Korean time and touched down in San Francisco at 11:28 a.m PDT, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flights. The flight lasted 10 hours and 24 minutes, it said. Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the agency was sending a team of investigators to San Francisco and that it is too early to determine the cause of the crash. "We will be looking at everything," she told reporters at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, outside Washington. "Everything is on the table. We have to gather the facts before we reach any conclusions." The FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said her agency was also sending investigators. Boeing expressed concern for those on board the flight and added that it will provide technical assistance to the NTSB as it investigates the accident. A San Francisco airport spokesman said that a component of the facility's instrument landing system that tracks an incoming airplane's glide path has been out of service in recent weeks and was not operational on Saturday. Pilots and air safety experts said the glide path technology was far from essential for a safe landing in good weather. But Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, a retired pilot and safety consultant who gained fame for landing a plane safely in the Hudson River in 2009, said investigators would certainly be looking into the issue. "The pilots would have had to rely solely on visual cues to fly the proper glide path to the runway, and not have had available to them the electronic information that they typically have even in good weather at most major airports," he told the local CBS News affiliate. A British Airways 777-200ER crash-landed a few yards short of a runway at London's Heathrow Airport in 2008. All on board survived. Investigators blamed the crash on fuel blockages caused by ice particles formed during the long flight from Beijing - a finding that led to changes in the design of the Rolls-Royce engines used on some 777s. The Asiana 777-200ER that crashed in San Francisco on Saturday was powered by engines from Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Technologies. (Reporting by Alistain Barr, Sarah McBride, Ronnia Cohen, Poornima Gupta, Laila Kearney, Dan Levine, Gerry Shih, Jonathan Weber and Peter Henderson in San Francisco. Jackie Frank and Toni Clarke in Washington, Kevin Gray in Miami and Alex Dobuzinskis in San Francisco; Editing by David Storey and Philip Barbara) |
| Oil-laden freight train explodes in Canadian town, people killed Posted: LAC-MEGANTIC, Quebec (Reuters) - A fast-moving, driverless train hauling tankers of crude oil derailed and exploded into a sky-high fireball in the middle of a small Canadian town early on Saturday, destroying dozens of buildings and killing several people. The disaster took place soon after 1 a.m. (0500 GMT) when the runaway freight train with 72 cars and five locomotives hurtled into Lac-Megantic, a lakeside town of about 6,000 in the province of Quebec, and left the tracks. Police spokesman Guy Lapointe said one person had died, and that toll would rise, but he declined to comment on media reports that anywhere between 40 and 80 people were missing. "We have already confirmed one death and we expect there will be others," he told a news conference. "We also expect that the number of people reported missing will be greater than the final death toll." Crude oil shipments by rail have become increasingly popular in North America as pipelines fill to capacity and more and more oil is produced in western regions like Alberta and North Dakota. But accidents on this scale are rare. Four of the cars - which each carried 30,000 gallons of North Dakotan crude oil - caught fire and blew up in a fireball that mushroomed many hundreds of feet into the air. It destroyed dozens of buildings, many of them totally flattened, included stores, a library and the popular Musi-Cafe music bar, eyewitnesses said. The town centre was crowded with weekend partygoers at the time. Lapointe said it was hard to calculate the number of possible victims because the area was still too dangerous for police to examine properly. Some people had been reported missing more than once, and some were nowhere near the town. The blast ruptured a water main, creating a shortage of drinking water, forcing the town to bring in special tankers. The centre of town remained blocked off, but from the air, it was clear that many buildings had been reduced to little more than piles of bricks and wood. Residents' photos showed the burnt out hulks of cars next to smashed houses. After the blast, burning crude spilled into the storm sewers and rose up through street manholes, setting buildings on fire, the head of the rail company that ran the train told Reuters. Edward Burkhardt, chairman of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, said an engineer had parked the train some distance from the town a few hours before the disaster. "He claims he set the brakes on all five of the engines. He also claims he set the brakes on a sufficient number of cars on the train," he told Reuters in an interview. Officials said they had few reports of injured victims, suggesting that people caught up in the blast either died on the spot or managed to escape. One woman told Radio-Canada that she had been unable to contact around 15 of her friends. Stunned town residents cried in the streets as the impact of the blast sank in. Some hugged each other for comfort. The rail tracks pass next to the Musi-Cafe, which is popular with young people. Eyewitness Yvon Rosa said he had just left when he saw the train speeding into the middle of the town. "I have never seen a train travelling that quickly into the centre of Lac-Megantic," he told Radio-Canada, saying he watched as the train careened around a bend. "I saw the wagons come off the tracks ... everything exploded. In just one minute the centre of the town was covered in fire." Residents said they had heard five or six large blasts. More than 21 hours after the derailment, one car was still burning and fire-fighters, some of them from the United States, were still spraying cold water from the lake on five unexploded tanker cars they said posed a particular danger. CENTER OF TOWN 'ALMOST DESTROYED' Police imposed a 1/2-mile (1-km) security zone around the blast and evacuated a total of about 2,000 people from their homes. "When you see the centre of your town almost destroyed, you'll understand that we're asking ourselves how we are going to get through this event," a tearful Town Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche told a televised news briefing earlier in the day. The Canadian Transportation Safety Board, which probes all accidents, said it was looking for the train's "black box" data recorder. Lac-Megantic is part of Quebec's Eastern Townships region, an area popular with tourists that borders both Maine and Vermont. Quebec is a predominantly French-speaking province in the eastern half of Canada. Montreal, Maine & Atlantic owns some 510 miles (820 km) of track in Maine and Vermont in the United States and in Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada. The debate over shipping oil by rail is becoming increasingly topical as U.S. President Barack Obama decides whether to approve TransCanada Corp's proposed Keystone XL pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Texas coast. Backers of Keystone XL - a project that environmentalists strongly oppose - say transporting oil by pipeline is safer than using rail cars. There have been a number of high-profile derailments of trains carrying petroleum products in Canada recently, including one in Calgary, Alberta, last week when a flood-damaged bridge sagged toward the still-swollen Bow River. The derailed rail cars were removed without spilling their cargo. (Reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa, P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago and Scott Haggett in Calgary; Editing by Eric Beech and Jackie Frank) |
| Aircraft in U.S. crash has solid safety record Posted: SINGAPORE/PARIS (Reuters) - The crash of a South Korean airliner in San Francisco on Saturday with more than 300 people on board dampens the safety record of one of the world's safest aircraft. Initial reports said two people were killed and more than 70 injured when the Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 crashed on landing at San Francisco International Airport. If confirmed, it would be the first fatal accident involving a Boeing 777, a family of twin-engined long-haul aircraft which has been in service for the past 18 years. With more than five million flights, according to Boeing, it remains one of the industry's solid workhorses. It also would be the third fatal accident involving one of Asia's fastest growing full-service airlines, which first began operations in 1988 as a rival to South Korea's flag carrier Korean Air Lines. There was no immediate clue on the possible cause of the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to start examining the wreckage. The aircraft that crashed on Saturday was seven years old, having left the Boeing factory in 2006. It is a 777-200ER, a version of Boeing's "mini-jumbo" 777 family capable of transporting 301 passengers in standard cabin layouts up to 14,300 km (8,880 miles). In January 2008, all passengers and crew survived when a similar British Airways 777-200ER crash landed yards short of the runway at London's Heathrow Airport. A two-year investigation blamed the crash on a fuel blockage caused by the release of ice which had built up during the long flight from Beijing. The discovery led to changes in the design of the British Rolls-Royce engines used on some 777s. The British Airways pilot was credited with having avoided a much worse accident. The Asiana 777-200ER that crashed on Saturday was powered by engines from Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Technologies. Pratt & Whitney said it was "cooperating fully with investigating authorities". PREMIUM ROUTE Boeing has received a total of 422 orders for the 777-200ER of which just one remains to be delivered, to Asiana itself, according to the Boeing website. The catalogue price of the airplane is $259 million. South Korea developed a spotty safety reputation after a series of major, and sometimes fatal, incidents in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s that mostly involved Korean Air aircraft. Asiana's only previous fatal crash involving a passenger aircraft was in July 1993, when a Boeing 737-500 landed several kilometres short of the runway in South Korea's Mokpo airport in poor weather. In that crash, 68 people lost their lives. In July 2011, an Asiana Boeing 747-400 cargo aircraft crashed in the sea off Korea's Jeju Island and this was later determined to have been caused by a fire in the cargo hold. Both pilots were killed. In the 1990s, Korean Air and the South Korean government embarked on a series of efforts to improve safety standards. This resulted in a sharp decline in incidents involving Korean airlines in the 2000s and the country has become an example to countries like Indonesia which are trying to improve their safety standards. Owned partly by South Korea's Kumho Asiana Group, Asiana Airlines has grown rapidly to get a significant share of the domestic and international market out of Seoul's Incheon airport, one of Asia's largest air hubs. A key plank of the Asiana strategy has been to become a larger player in the highly lucrative traffic between South Korea and the United States, and to become a hub carrier that carries passengers between other parts of Asia and the United States via Seoul. Asiana's long-haul fleet of 12 Boeing 777-200ER and two Boeing 747-400s are used primarily on services to the United States and Europe. Asiana, which became a member of the Star Alliance in 2003, has ordered six Airbus A380 superjumbos and 30 Airbus A350 aircraft, including around 22 of the longer-range -900 and -1000 variants. It will begin to receive these aircraft from 2014 and use them on services to the United States and Europe. (Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan) |
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