Two people were killed and 49 critically hurt when a Boeing 777 broke apart and caught fire yesterday afternoon as it touched down at San Francisco International Airport.
One witness told The Post the ill-fated Asiana Airlines Flight 214 from Seoul appeared to bounce off the ground and nearly flipped.
“I saw this plane coming in. At first, it looked like a normal landing,” said Kate Belding, 56, who witnessed the crash.
“But then all of a sudden, I noticed a puff of dust or dirt from right where the plane was landing. It was like it bounced, and it was a big, loud bang, and then one of the wings went up and went back, and [it] almost cartwheeled.”
One passenger said that the plane seemed to come down too fast during the landing.
“We were too low, too soon,” Benjamin Levy told the LA Times in a phone interview. “He was going down pretty fast.”
The engines revved, Levy said, just before the plane was going to hit the water.
“I think the pilot must have realized, because [he] tried to pull the plane back up,” Levy said. “We hit pretty hard. And I thought the wheels were gone for sure.”
More than 300 people — 291 passengers and 16 crew members — were on the 10-hour flight when the fiery disaster unfolded on runway 28L at about 11:38 a.m. Pacific time.
There were 61 US citizens aboard, as well as 77 Korean citizens, 141 Chinese, and one person from Japan.
A group of vacationing South Korean schoolchildren were reportedly on the plane.
“I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off . . . Surreal,” tweeted passenger David Eun, a Samsung executive vice president.
Design student Elijah D’Arcy was waiting inside the terminal for his flight to Los Angeles, when suddenly, everyone ran to the windows overlooking the tarmac.
“All of a sudden, I see a huge cloud of smoke on the runway,” the University of San Francisco student said.
As everyone inside the terminal watched, “the dust blew away and then you could see, it was a plane. It was wreckage, and the tail was off.”
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