DEVASTATING: Ye Mengyuan (left) and Wang Linjia, both 16, died in or after Saturday’s fiery crash (AP)
They were top-tier high-school students from China eager for a taste of American culture and a chance to attend college in the United States.
Close friends Ye Mengyuan and Wang Linjia, both 16, were on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the United States when their lives were cut short in Saturday’s crash of Asiana Flight 214 at San Francisco International Airport.
Both were student leaders with high marks at Jiangshan Middle School, one of the most competitive schools in the wealthy Zhejiang province outside Shanghai.
Ye was a champion gymnast who excelled in literature, while Wang favored physics and calligraphy and recently wrote online about her planned trip to Silicon Valley and several California colleges.
Official Chinese media reported that Wang’s grieving mom was weeping silently on a bed when a reporter visited, while her dad sat in a chair with a blank expression.
A next-door neighbor said their daughter “was very keen to learn.”
“Every time she came home, she would be studying. Very rarely did she go out and play,” said the woman, identified only by her surname, Xia.
The bodies of both girls were found outside the wreckage of the Boeing 777, and officials are looking into the possibility that one of them was killed by a rescue vehicle as it raced to the scene.
National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman — who called that scenario a “very serious issue” — said investigators had reviewed airport surveillance video without reaching any conclusion.
“I can tell you that the two fatalities were located in seats toward the rear of the aircraft,” Hersman said of the girls’ location. “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.”
The San Mateo Coroner’s Office will determine the cause of death, she added.
Hersman declined to discuss the training of pilot Lee Kang-kook, who had only 43 hours’ experience flying a 777, saying she didn’t want to “bias” interviews being conducted yesterday in both English and Korean with him and three other pilots on the crew of the fated flight.
But she offered a detailed account of the doomed plane’s descent from an altitude of 1,600 feet, where its autopilot was switched off 82 seconds before impact.
Nine seconds later, the plane was at 1,400 feet and flying at 170 knots, but it had slowed to 134 knots by the time it reached 500 feet.
At 200 feet, it was traveling at 118 knots — well below the target landing speed of 137 knots — and was still slowing when the throttle started moving forward eight seconds before the crash. The speed was pegged at just 106 knots at the moment of impact, Hersman said