Investigators probe cause of San Francisco plane crash

By Harriet Ryan, Lee Romney and Maeve Reston

July 6, 2013 1:47 PM PT

SAN FRANCISCO -- The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team to investigate the Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 that crashed while landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday.

There has been no official word regarding injuries or fatalities and the cause of the crash was unclear.

Witnesses said the tail of the plane apparently broke off from the fuselage on impact and the aircraft caught on fire, but many passengers were able to escape.

The fire was extinguished by firefighters. The airport was closed until further notice.

David Eun, an executive with a tech company who was on the plane, sent out a message on Twitter saying: “Most people are totally calm and trying to let the fire and rescue do their jobs.... Posted updates to let everyone know that majority of passengers seem ok.”

Photos taken by passengers on the flight show people on the runway and smoke coming from the aircraft. Other photos show the tail of the plane broken off.

In a brief phone interview, a passenger from the flight who didn’t want to give his name told The Times that most passengers on the flight were unharmed.

“I just want their families to know,” he said. “Most of the people seem OK and we’re just letting the paramedics do their job.”

San Francisco Fire Department officials told KTVU-TV that injured passengers were taken to the hospital. Their severity of their injuries was unknown.

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Harriet Ryan

Harriet Ryan is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2008, she has written about high-profile people, including Phil Spector, Michael Jackson and Tom Girardi, and institutions, including USC, the State Bar of California, the Catholic Church, the Kabbalah Centre and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Ryan won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with colleagues Matt Hamilton and Paul Pringle in 2019. She and Hamilton won the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability in 2023. She previously worked at Court TV and the Asbury Park Press. She is a graduate of Columbia University.

Lee Romney

Former staff writer Lee Romney covered the Bay Area and Northern California news for the Los Angeles Times from the San Francisco bureau. Romney grew up in Canada and then Arizona before moving to the Bay Area. She started with the L.A. Times in 1992 and after many years in the Southland returned to San Francisco in 2003. She left the newsroom in 2015.