continued to proceed down the runway on its belly and that s when it did the 360 spin. so, jennifer hang on, richard, hang on richard, and jennifer. just because i wanted to be completely clear here. we don t know what happened. this is your assessment of what happened. you mean it spun around, not flipped around, correct? that s correct. it seemed like more of a spin than a flop. the wings did not break off in some type of - it definitely was somewhat airborne when it did just spin-around flip. but, yeah, it definitely wasn t necessarily a cartwheel. it seemed like the wings were still intact. don? yeah, go ahead. this is jim. before we do this, i want to read this. this is from boeing plane, this is a tweet from boeing planes.
no jim tillmon at this point. robert francis, explain to us in lay man s term what that means, 214 heavy? 214 is the flight number. heavy is an aircraft that s bigger than a 757. 737, 757, 767 are all none of those are considered heavys. 777s, a-380s, those are considered heavy. and that s that s for air traffic controllers really to give them an idea of where they should be putting the aircraft. so, as we were listening to that, basically i mean that s after the incident happened, they are saying they are trying to get as much emergency personnel, that s really what that transmission this was all about, they are trying to get as much emergency personnel to this plane to help them out as quickly as possible. absolutely. and these people that are being
per hour and even that is doable, so, again, it couldn t have been better. if we look at the satellite picture now, this is the time of the year, and even jim tillmon, on the west coast for those not familiar with it, from san francisco down to the bay area, all the way down to san diego, you do get a marine layer, and that moves in and creates visibility problems but that burns off at 10:30 or 11:30 in the morning, but the radar is clear. don, this is quite interesting, the flight comes in, and this is the asiana flight comes down the coast on the northwest flight line, it comes around and banks around to the right. in fact, you can actually see it here as it flies around the bay. and then it comes and approaches the landing. we re going to get in a little bit closer here. in fact, you can actually see where the runway is. as it banks back and around, this is where the plane is, but what s ideal here and we all saw it here, the video which is amazing, fredricka we ll show it again
place. we have a team of people who are helping us out here. we have reporters stretched around the country. we have reporters stretched around the world. even our political reporter dana bash on an airplane at the san francisco international airport affected by this. dana reported for us just a short time ago. dan simon is in san francisco as well. jim tillmon is an aviation expert and richard quest reports on aviation here and is an expert for cnn. i want to go to jim tillmon now. jim, we re looking at this. the weather situation at least from a layman s point of view as i m looking at it doesn t appear to be particularly bad. i don t know what the wind was bad. as you look at these pictures, what do they tell you? after having forecast weather for many, many years, as you know, don, i see absolutely nothing that the weather had to do with this situation, nothing that meets the eye at least. there can be some swirling currents and that sort of thing
to see the main gear touch the ground. yes, they did touch down very, very early and that led to disaster. all right, jim tillmon, i want you to stand by, because i want to reset what happened, what s going on for our viewers in case you are just tuning in here on cnn. we are following breaking news at san francisco s international airport, a large commercial airliner, a boeing 777, from asiana airlines crash landed just a short time ago. a number of passengers on board. we re not exactly sure how many passengers were on board. we re not sure of any injuries. we do know that many passengers ran off this planes, some of them taking pictures as the ones you are seeing now, as they were fleeing the plane and trying to get to safety here. again, we re being told by the faa that this was a crash landing. what they call a textbook crash landing. the tail broke off the plane. the fuselage at the top, you can see partially burned, most of it