Evacuation order given 90 seconds after Asiana plane skidded to halt

Passengers aboard the Asiana Airlines plane that crashed in San Francisco were initially told not to evacuate the aircraft after it skidded to a halt on the runway, a federal safety official said on Wednesday.

But a flight attendant saw fire outside the plane, and the call to exit was made, 90 seconds after the crash, said National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Deborah Hersman at a San Francisco press conference. The first emergency response vehicles arrived 30 seconds later.

The Saturday crash of the Boeing 777 killed two and injured more than 180.

In her fourth media briefing on the accident, Hersman said three flight attendants and their seats were ejected from the plane after it hit a seawall in front of the runway and lost its tail section. Two other flight attendants were temporarily pinned inside the cabin when two different evacuation chutes deployed inside the aircraft.

Hersman noted that an immediate evacuation is not always the standard procedure or the correct decision for pilots to make. “The pilots indicated that they were working with aircraft control,” she said. “We don’t know what the pilots were thinking but I can tell you that in previous accidents there have been crews that don’t evacuate. They wait for other crews to come,” she said.

Safety rules require that it be possible to evacuate all passengers from a plane in a 90-second period.