The Heroes Of Asiana Airlines Flight 214

When Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed at San Francisco International Airport in 2013, the Boeing 777 broke apart and caught fire. As passengers fought to escape the wreckage, the cabin crew’s bravery, training and quick thinking helped save hundreds of lives — proving why flight attendants remain aviation’s most important safety professionals.

On Saturday, July 6, 2013, Asiana Airlines Flight OZ214 was nearing the end of what should have been a routine transpacific service from Seoul Incheon to San Francisco.

On board the Boeing 777-200ER, registered HL7742, were 291 passengers and 16 crew members: four pilots and 12 flight attendants. None of them could have known that, within minutes, the aircraft would be lying broken and burning beside Runway 28L at San Francisco International Airport — and that the actions of the cabin crew would help prevent an already catastrophic accident from becoming an even greater tragedy.

Three passengers would lose their lives. Forty passengers, eight flight attendants, and one pilot sustained serious injuries. Yet 304 of the 307 people on board survived, a survival rate the NTSB later described as remarkable given the severity of the crash, the destruction of the aft fuselage, and the post-impact fire.

The Cabin Crew

In the cabin, the crew began the familiar arrival routine. Bags were stowed. Tray tables were lifted. Seats were checked. Exits were secured. Galleys were locked down. Then came the moment every crew member knows well: taking their jumpseat, fastening their harness, and running through the mental emergency review that has been drilled into them throughout training.

What commands would I shout? Which exit am I responsible for? Is there fire, smoke, water, obstruction, or debris outside? What equipment will I take? Who might need help? What if my exit is unusable?

Most crew will also admit that, in quieter moments, a small part of that review can wander elsewhere. What are we doing after landing? What’s for dinner? Is it a hotel-room layover or a rare chance to explore?

But on Flight 214, that silent review would become very real.

In charge of the crew and cabin that day was Cabin Manager Lee Yoon-hye, an Asiana flight attendant with almost two decades of experience. She was joined by fellow crew members including Yoo Tae Sik, Han Woo Lee, Hong Jung-ah, Hyun Sook Young, Jeon Soo Min, Kim Ji Youn, Kim Yoon-ju, Lee Jeong Mi, Lee Jin Hee, Maninart Tinnakul, and Siritip Singhakarn.

Lee would later be hailed around the world as one of the heroes of the accident. Speaking afterwards, she recalled feeling the aircraft behave strangely in the seconds before impact. “Right before touchdown, I felt like the plane was trying to take off,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘What’s happening?’ and then I felt a bang; that bang felt harder than a normal landing. It was a very big shock. Afterwards, there was another shock, and the plane swayed to the right and to the left.”

The Approach Goes Wrong

Flight 214 was operating a visual approach to Runway 28L. The instrument landing system glideslope for that runway was out of service due to construction, but the NTSB later stressed that this should not have prevented a safe visual approach. The weather was clear, and the crew still had other visual and cockpit cues available to manage the descent.

In the cockpit, the aircraft was being flown by a trainee captain undergoing operating experience on the Boeing 777. The instructor pilot, who was the pilot-in-command, occupied the right-hand seat and was monitoring the approach. Two relief pilots were also on board.

During the final stages of the approach, the aircraft became increasingly unstable. It was too high earlier in the approach, then descended below the desired glidepath. Airspeed decayed. At around 500ft, the aircraft was descending at approximately 1,200ft per minute, significantly above the rate needed to maintain the desired path, while thrust remained at idle. By the time the crew recognised the low speed and low path and attempted a go-around, the aircraft was below 100ft and did not have the performance capability to recover.

At approximately 11:28 local time, the 777 struck the seawall short of Runway 28L.

The landing gear and tail section absorbed the first devastating blows. The tail and aft galley area were torn away, both engines separated, and the aircraft spun violently before coming to rest beside the runway. A fire then developed near the separated right engine, adjacent to the right side of the fuselage.

“Brace! Brace!”

In those final seconds, cabin crew shouted brace commands to passengers. That instinctive response mattered.

The NTSB later found that the crash produced severe impact forces, especially in the aft cabin. Many of the most serious injuries were concentrated towards the rear of the aircraft, and 24 passengers and five flight attendants sustained spinal injuries. The report also noted that passengers and crew who remained restrained had a far greater chance of surviving and evacuating.

Two teenage passengers seated near the rear were ejected from the aircraft during the impact sequence. The NTSB concluded that they were not wearing their seat belts and that they would likely have remained inside the cabin and survived had they been restrained. One of them survived the crash itself but was tragically struck by two emergency vehicles after being ejected onto the airfield. A third passenger, who had been seated in the aft cabin, later died in hospital from her injuries.

For the crew, the crash was almost unimaginable. Ceiling panels, oxygen masks, loose items, and debris fell through the cabin. Some passengers were injured and disoriented. Some crew were incapacitated. The aft galley, where several flight attendants had been seated, had been destroyed.

Four flight attendants in the rear of the aircraft were ejected through the ruptured tail section while still strapped into their jumpseats or restraint systems. All four survived, but they were seriously injured.

Yoon-hye recalled the chaos of those final moments: “After the plane stopped, I looked around the plane, and it was just horrible. Some passengers were rolling down the aisles because of the impact, and safety experts say people without a brace position will become projectiles.” 

The Evacuation

Cabin crew are trained to wait for a clear evacuation command from the flight deck unless the situation is obviously life-threatening. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, there was confusion. The crew initially received instructions to hold the evacuation while the pilots assessed the situation and communicated with the tower.

The NTSB later found that the evacuation was not initiated until around one minute and 33 seconds after the aircraft came to a stop. The delay was attributed partly to the pilot monitoring’s instruction not to begin an immediate evacuation, as well as disorientation and confusion following the crash. Once fire was identified outside Door 2R, the cabin crew acted appropriately in initiating the evacuation.

Then training took over.

Doors 1L and 2L were opened almost simultaneously. Passengers began escaping down the slides roughly 10 seconds later. Door 3R was also used after a passenger opened it, with the remaining able-bodied crew member in the rear cabin directing passengers towards usable exits.

But not all exits were available. Two slides at doors 1R and 2R inflated inside the aircraft during the impact. The 1R slide inflated into the forward galley area, while the 2R slide inflated into the mid-cabin galley, blocking the aisle and trapping crew members. Both doors became unusable. The obstruction at 2R also created a bottleneck, forcing passengers to cross the cabin to reach other exits.

Incredibly, the evacuation was effectively carried out by just five of the 12 flight attendants, using only three of the eight main cabin doors: 1L, 2L, and 3R.

The crew faced problems that no training manual could fully prepare them for. Two colleagues were pinned beneath inflated slide rafts inside the aircraft. The cabin manager retrieved a knife from the galley, and the relief first officer used it to puncture one of the slides. Crew and flight deck members worked together to free the trapped attendants, while smoke and fire continued to spread.

Outside, the evacuation was far from orderly. Some passengers escaped barefoot. Some were injured. Some carried cabin baggage, despite repeated safety briefings and crew commands to leave everything behind. The images of passengers fleeing a burning aircraft with hand luggage remain a stark reminder of how dangerous that behaviour can be. Every second spent reaching for a bag, blocking an aisle, or hesitating at an exit can cost lives.

Fighting Fire And Saving Lives

Inside the damaged fuselage, Lee Yoon-hye continued helping passengers evacuate. She moved through the cabin, assisted the injured, and helped coordinate the response while fire and smoke intensified.

“I wasn’t really thinking, but my body started carrying out the steps needed for an evacuation. I was only thinking about rescuing the next passenger,” she explained. “I stayed back there to make sure everyone got off before I exited the plane. By that time, the fire had spread, and I had to jump out of a hole.”

Several flight attendants who made it out also continued working outside the wreckage. They gathered passengers together, assisted the injured, and told emergency responders that four crew members from the rear of the aircraft were missing.

Airport emergency responders were alerted within seconds of the impact. According to the NTSB, the first airport operations vehicle reached the aircraft at 11:30:16, while evacuation from doors 1L and 2L was already underway. The first San Francisco Fire Department aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle arrived at 11:31:11 and began applying agent to the fire near the right engine and fuselage. By 11:33:02, seven firefighting vehicles were on scene.

Knives were handed to the crew that remained onboard to cut free passengers still trapped by their seatbelts, and rescuers continued to scour the plane until everyone had been evacuated. Outside, triage centres were hastily established to classify patients based on the severity of their injuries. Airport staff and responding agencies worked in conjunction, transporting injured passengers across the tarmac and getting critically wounded individuals airlifted to trauma centres.

Firefighters later entered the aircraft and extricated five passengers who were injured and unable to escape. One of those passengers later died in hospital. The NTSB concluded that 98% of passengers successfully self-evacuated, while the overall survival rate was 99%.

Lee Yoon-hye was among the last to leave the aircraft. She had suffered a broken tailbone but remained focused on the passengers and crew around her. San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White later praised her composure and heroism, noting that Lee was so calm she initially appeared to have come from the terminal rather than the wrecked aircraft.

Passenger Eugene Anthony-Rah, who had been seated in business class, also described the courage of one of the flight attendants, recalling how she carried people to safety while visibly emotional but still calm and determined.

The Missing Crew

For several terrifying minutes, there were fears for the crew members seated in the rear galley area. The aft fuselage had suffered the worst structural damage, and those stationed there had borne the full violence of the impact.

The NTSB later found that four aft flight attendants had been ejected through the ruptured tail section during the aircraft’s slide down the runway. Their restraints had not failed in a simple sense; rather, the structure around them had been destroyed. Jumpseats and sections of the aft galley were ripped from the aircraft.

That all four survived is extraordinary.

Some were found in the debris field. Others remained in or near their damaged seating positions. All had sustained serious injuries, but they were alive — a testament not only to aircraft crashworthiness, but also to the sheer unpredictability of survivability in a high-energy accident.

Other Heroes

And it wasn’t just the crew on Flight 214 that showed their professionalism that afternoon. Waiting to take off as the ill-fated jet landed was United Airlines Flight 885. Passengers seated on the left side of the Boeing 747-400 were first-hand witnesses to the terrible crash and its aftermath. For the crew on board, it must have been a terrifying sight, knowing that their colleagues, albeit in different uniforms, were battling to save lives.

Yet during the three hours that they had to sit on that tarmac, they remained the consummate professionals we are trained to be. The First Officer on Flight 885 later made a statement to the press and spoke of their bravery: “We made numerous PAs to the passengers telling them any information we had, which we acknowledged was going to change rapidly, and I left the cockpit to check on the flight attendants and the overall mood of the passengers, as I was the third pilot and not in a control seat.”

“A couple of our flight attendants were shaken, but all were doing an outstanding and professional job of handling the passengers’ needs and providing calm comfort to them. One of the flight attendants contacted the unaccompanied minors’ parents to ensure that their children were safe and would be taken care of by our crew. Their demeanour and professionalism during this horrific event were noteworthy.”

The Investigation

The NTSB’s final report concluded that the probable cause of the crash was the flight crew’s mismanagement of the descent during the visual approach, the unintended deactivation of automatic airspeed control, inadequate monitoring of airspeed, and the delayed execution of a go-around after the aircraft was already below acceptable glidepath and airspeed tolerances.

Contributing factors included the complexity of the Boeing 777’s autothrottle and autopilot flight director systems; shortcomings in Boeing documentation and Asiana training related to those systems; non-standard cockpit communication and coordination; inadequate supervision of the trainee captain; and flight crew fatigue.

But the report also made clear that the cabin crew’s actions mattered.

The NTSB concluded that the flight attendants acted appropriately by initiating the evacuation after identifying the fire. It also found that, despite the catastrophic nature of the crash, the aircraft protected most occupants sufficiently for them to escape, with 98% of passengers able to self-evacuate.

One of the biggest reasons so many people survived the events of that tragic day was due to the actions of the cabin crew. NTSB reports revealed that many of the passengers who adopted the brace position after the crew began shouting the command managed to walk away relatively unharmed. Several of those who didn’t suffer spinal injuries and even paralysis. The report added that the high survival rate was also “largely due to the effectiveness of cabin emergency exits and evacuation slides, coupled with the arrival of emergency responders within 90 seconds of impact.”

A safety announcement once put it perfectly: “The most important safety feature we have on board this aircraft is the flight attendants. Please look at one now.”

The cabin crew of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 proved exactly that.

Cabin crew, flight attendants, trolley dollies — whatever you want to call us — are not just there to pour tea at 35,000ft. They are the last line of defence when everything goes wrong.

And on July 6, 2013, the crew of Asiana 214 showed the world what aviation heroes really look like.

Cover image credit: NTSB

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