The two people killed when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crashed at San Francisco International Airport have been identified as 16-year-old schoolgirls from eastern China, as National Transportation Safety Board officials on the scene begin their investigation.
NTSB officials told NBC News they have recovered both black boxes from Saturday's ill-fated flight which originated from Shanghai, China, and stopped over in Seoul, South Korea's capital. The NTSB lab will analyze the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder to determine what went wrong.
Animation of the plane crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 at SFO.
Photos posted on the NTSB's Twitter page overnight showed Chairman Deborah Hersman and Investigator-in-Charge Bill English looking at interior damage.
"I think we're very thankful that the numbers were not worse when it came to fatalities and injuries," Hersman said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday. "It could have been much worse."
NTSB tweeted that it will hold a press briefing at 4:30 p.m. ET to provide updates on the investigation.
182 people were transported to area hospitals, 49 with critical injuries, after Flight 214 crashed and burst into flames Saturday morning upon landing, SFO officials said.
According to San Francisco International Airport spokesman Doug Yakel, a key component of the airport's instrument landing system that tracks and guides an arriving airplane's course was turned off on Saturday, NBC News reported.
Helicopter video of the scene showed the plane with severe burn damage to the top of its fuselage. The jumbo jet's tail section was detached and a line of debris stretched to the bay.
Passengers described chaos in the aftermath of the accident, with many of the 291 onboard escaping by sliding down emergency inflatable slides.
"It was surreal," Benjamin Levy, a businessman seated in the Boeing 777 jetliner's 32nd row, told NBC Bay Area. "A lot of people screaming and not really believing what has happening to them. I wasn't believing it either."
Levy said it seemed the plane had been coming in too low for landing at San Francisco, and the pilot "missed the runway quite completely."
"He tried to correct, which probably helped," he said. "We would have hit the rocks."
Six people remained in critical condition Sunday at San Francisco General Hospital, one of nine Bay Area hospitals attending to victims of the crash. Injuries included broken bones and burns, NBC News reported.
For full U.S. and world news coverage, visit NBCNews.com.
Asiana Airlines President Yoon Young-doo identified the two fatalities Sunday as female teenagers from China, saying they had been sitting at the back of the plane. The South Korean airline's official Weibo microblog later said both girls, Ye Mengtuan and Wang Linjia, were 16-year-old students at Jiangshan Middle School.
Speaking at a news conference in Seoul, Young-doo said that he did not believe the flight suffered an engine defect. He described the four pilots aboard the plane at the time of the crash as "skilled," the AP reported. Three of the pilots had each logged more than 10,000 hours of flight time, he said.
Still, Young-doo bowed and said that he was "extending my deep apology" to passengers, their families and South Koreans.
Education officials in China said that at least 70 students and teachers from the highly competitive Jiangshan Middle School were on Flight 214 heading to summer camps, The Associated Press reported.
The two students who perished were among 30 high school students from the town of Jiangshan in Zhejiang province, eastern China, Chinese media reported, according to The New York Times.
All were set to attend a 15-day English language program at California universities, according to a Shanghai newspaper, the Times reported.
Wang Linjia, posted her last messages to her account on a Chinese microblogging site on June 5, which read, "Maybe time can dilute the coffee in the cup, it can flatten the contour of memory," according to Chinese media, the Times reported. Then an hour laters she wrote "Go."
Aboard the plane was also a group of 30 students and six teachers from north China's Shanxi Province, Xinhua, China's official news service reported.
Federal investigators said Saturday it was too early to determine why the plane crashed into SFO's Runway 28.
The plane crashed in favorable weather, partly cloudy skies and light wind,NTSB officials who spoke with NBC News said.
SFO officials said a total of 307 people were on board Flight 214: 291 passengers and 16 crew members. Asiana Airlines said the passengers included 77 Koreans, 141 "of Chinese descent," 61 U.S. citizens, three from India, one Japanese, one from Vietnam, and seven of unknown origin.
Flights in and out of SFO were suspended for about four hours after the crash, the first fatal accident at the airport in 75 years.
Saturday's crash was also the second major accident invoving a Boeing 777 in the 18 years the model has been in service, according to the AP. That earlier accident occured Jan. 17, 2008, when British Airways Flight 28 from China landed about 1,000 feet short of the runway at London's Heathrow Airport. The impact broke the jet's landing gear and caused 47 injuries.
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