The Asiana Airlines pilot of the flight that crashed recently says he was blinded by a bright light at he attempted the landing.
Lee Kang Kuk was flying to San Francisco International Airport for the first time on a Boeing 777 after just having 43 hours of experience with the plane. He says that he saw a bright flash when he approached the runway about 35 second before the plane hit the ground. At that point, the aircraft was about 500 feet off the air and was beginning to slow down and make a steep drop, the New York Post reports.
The plane, Asiana Airlines Flight 214 then crash-landed at the airport on Saturday as it came in too low and too slow. Two passengers died and about 180 were injured in the accident.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is not ruling out the possibility of there being lasers that could have blinded the pilot. However it is not clear if this was the cause of it other factors came into play.
Some 911 calls have been released that reveal more information about what happened after the crash. Some said that not enough help arrived.
"We've been on the ground, I don't know, 20 minutes, a half hour," one woman said in a 911 call released by the California Highway Patrol. "There are people laying on the tarmac with critical injuries, head injuries. We're almost losing a woman here. We're trying to keep her alive."
"There's not enough medics out here. There is a woman out here on the street, on the runway, who is pretty much burned very severely on the head and we don't know what to do," another caller said.
San Francisco officials claim that they couldn't get too close to the plane because there was a risk that it would explode. One of the two Chinese teenagers killed may have actually been run over by an emergency response vehicle.
Investigators are trying to figure out what went on in the cockpit between the two pilots before the crash. It was the first time that Lee Kang-kuk and Lee Jeong-Min had flown together.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
