NYtime 文章.docx

Terror on Jet: Seeing Water, Not RunwaySAN FRANCISCO — The nearly 11-hour trip across the Pacific had gone smoothly as Asiana Flight 214 approached San Francisco International Airport — an uneventful flight for the 291 passengers, including dozens of Chinese teenagers who were arriving for a summer camp to study English and tour colleges.But from seat 30K, Benjamin Levy knew something was wrong. Outside his window, as the plane approached the airport where Mr. Levy, a frequent traveler, knew there should have been tarmac, there was instead a terrifying sight: the waters of San Francisco Bay.“The pilot put the gas full steam, and we tipped back up — he went full throttle to regain a bit of altitude,” Mr. Levy said from his home on Sunday, a day after he survived the crash landing that killed two 16-year-old girls among the group of Chinese students and injured 180 of the passengers arriving from South Korea.“We were so close to the water, the water got sprayed up,” Mr. Levy said. “There were walls of water beside the window — before we started hitting earth.”When the screaming ceased inside the Boeing 777, the plane rested on its belly, its tail and engines sheared by the crash.The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday that the pilots came in too slowly, took too long to realize it and tried to abort the landing seconds before the crash. The South Korean Transport Ministry said the pilot, Lee Kang-guk, had only 43 hours of experience flying a 777. It was Mr. Lee’s first time piloting a 777 into the San Francisco airport, an Asiana spokeswoman said. “For now, this itself should not be cited as if it were the cause of the accident,” said Chang Man-hee, a senior aviation policy official at the transport ministry. “Mr. Lee himself was a veteran pilot going through what every pilot has to when switching to a new type of plane.”In a dramatic moment-by-moment account, the N.T.S.B.s chairwoman, Deborah A. P. Hersman, suggested that crew members had lit