Chinese girls in Asiana wreck lived, died as best pals

AP

Teen girls Ye Mengyuan, left, and Wang Linjia, right, pose for photos with other classmates at school in Jiangshan, a city in eastern China's Zhejiang province. The obvious best friends had planned to take part in a three-week exchange program in Los Angeles.

Two Chinese teens aboard the doomed Asiana flight into San Francisco were best friends who died as they lived ? by each other?s side.

Ye Mengyuan, a talented 17-year-old gymnast, and 16-year-old Wang Linjia, a physics marvel, hailed from China?s eastern Zhejiang Province and had been inseparable for four years.

Both were found dead on the tarmac, their bodies at least a mile apart, after the Boeing 777 crashed short of the runway Saturday.

Officials said it was possible one of the girls was run over by a fire truck rushing to the scene of the crash and killed.

?There was a possibility one of two fatalities might have been contacted by one of our apparatus at one point during the incident,? San Francisco Assistant Deputy Fire Chief Dale Carnes said Monday.

More than 180 of the 307 people aboard the plane were injured.

San Francisco Police Officer Jim Cunningham was hailed as a hero Monday after witnesses described him racing onto the wrecked plane without any protective gear and rescuing passengers as the aircraft began to burn.

But investigators were also examining reports by a crew member that two of the inflatable escape slides deployed inward instead of outward following the crash, pinning two flight attendants underneath.

Cabin manager Lee Yoon-hye said crew members used axes to deflate the slides, which were suffocating one of the attendants.

The best friends were seated near the back of the aircraft, which crashed tail first, said National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah Hersman.

?The two fatalities were located in seats toward the rear of the aircraft,? Hersman said. ?This is an area of the aircraft that was structurally significantly damaged. It?s an area where we?re seeing a lot of the critical or serious injuries.?

Officials said the distance between where the two bodies were found suggested one may have been thrown from the wreckage. An autopsy on both girls will not be completed for a few weeks, the San Mateo County coroner said.

The agonizing loss was only exacerbated by the latest details regarding the pilots at the helm of Asiana Flight 214.

The inexperienced pilot flying the plane was supervised by a ?senior pilot? who himself was on his first flight as a trainer. Lee Jung-min had just received his training certificate in June, a spokeswoman for the South Korean carrier said.

He was overseeing Lee Gang-guk, who had a mere 43 hours of experience flying a Boeing 777 and was attempting his first landing in San Francisco, the spokeswoman confirmed. Gang-guk had nearly 10,000 hours flying other planes.

Hersman reiterated Monday that pilot error was one of many possible causes of the crash. She added that the pilots were to be interviewed Monday.

Ye?s and Wang?s families, meanwhile, were en route to San Francisco from Shanghai.

?I?m going to go see my daughter,? Wang?s father, Wang Wensheng, said.

The teenage girls had planned to participate in a three-week exchange program in Los Angeles.

With Nancy Dillon and Soo Youn

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nydnrss/news/world/~3/yQvVCf0v-Zo/story01.htm

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