It had been an uneventful 10-plus hour flight from Seoul, South Korea, approaching San Francisco's airport on a clear summer day. Then, in a few horrifying seconds, that calm was shattered.
A fireball erupted after the Boeing 777 airliner hit the runway hard around 11:30 a.m., rocked back and forth, spun around, shearing off the plane's tail. Scores of passengers and crew climbed out -- some jumping, others sliding down evacuation chutes as flames and smoke billowed from the aircraft's windows.
Two people were found dead outside the plane, according to San Francisco fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White. "My understanding is that they were found on the runway," she said. The airline identified the dead girls as students Wang Linjia and Ye Mengyuan, both 16.
Somehow, 305 others survived.
Said San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee: "This could have been much worse."
CNN iReporter Timothy Clark watched from an eighth-floor balcony of a nearby hotel. He recalled hearing a bang, seeing a "dust cloud," then seeing "people running from the plane, then flames."
Elliott Stone was one of them. He was "10 seconds away from being home" when the airplane dipped "kind of sharp," followed by another adjustment "and then just boom, the back end just hit and flies up in the air and everybody's head goes up to the ceiling."
The first announcement "was everybody calm," Stone said, but he and others unbuckled anyway. He told CNN he jumped out a door, before slides had deployed and before first responders had arrived. When they did, they saw some people climbing out of San Francisco Bay around the airport, Hayes-White said.
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