Asiana Attendant, Lee Yoon-hye, the last person to leave the burning plane, described a malfunction that nearly caused the deaths of two of the cabin crew.
Seconds after the crash, two of the evacuation chutes suddenly inflated inside the aircraft, trapping two flight attendants beneath them. Other crew members grabbed axes and tore at the chutes to deflate them. Luckily, they succeeded, as at least one of the attendants was in danger of suffocating from the sheer weight.
Lee, who was actually the cabin manager, worked frantically to help extinguish the fire which threatened to engulf the passengers struggling to get out via the remaining escape chutes.
She praised the bravery of the crew and told of one attendant who carried a child on her back and onto a chute as the kid was too scared to slide down alone.
Most of the crew stayed until all the passengers had escaped. After the plane was empty, a pilot helped an injured flight attendant to safety.
But, perhaps bravest of all was Lee herself, who had been injured in the crash but still kept working to get the passengers out.
She only learned that she had broken her tailbone when she finally went for treatment to a hospital in San Francisco and a doctor found how badly she had been hurt.
Lee, 40, has worked for Asiana for 20 years, and says she knew something was wrong:
“Right before touchdown, I felt like the plane was trying to take off. I was thinking, ‘What’s happening?’ and then I felt a bang,” Lee said. “That bang felt harder than a normal landing. It was a very big shock. Afterward, there was another shock and the plane swayed to the right and to the left.”
When the captain told everyone to get out, she says she knew exactly what to do:
“I wasn’t really thinking, but my body started carrying out the steps needed for an evacuation, I was only thinking about rescuing the next passenger.”
The San Francisco fire chief, Joanne Hayes-White had nothing but praise for Lee: “She was so composed I thought she had come from the terminal……she wanted to make sure that everyone was off. … She was a hero.”
[Image via: Daily Mail ]