WITH teenage girls Wang Linjia and Ye Mengyuan the only fatalities in the crash, shocked survivors told of the flight’s final moments and of their narrow escape from injury or worse. “When the crash happened we felt we were done for. Equipment and everything was falling on our heads,” a teacher from northern Shanxi Province told CCTV. But, she added, “none of us were seriously injured.” Chinese nationals made up 141 of the 291 passengers aboard the Asiana Airlines Boeing 777, which burst into flames after it landed short of the runway. Of those on board, 182 were injured. Wang and Ye were part of a group of 30 students and four teachers from the highly competitive school in Zhejiang. Two other school groups were also on the plane. Twenty-two students and teachers were from Taiyuan No. 5 Secondary School in Shanxi, while 14 were from Taiyuan Foreign Language School. CCTV urged survivors and their loved ones to post information on the online messaging system WeChat so they could find one another. Xu Da, a Chinese passenger on board the plane — which originated in Shanghai and picked up passengers in South Korea before heading to the United States — described the dramatic incident to CCTV. “I noticed the plane was flying quite low when landing, and as it was just about to land the plane suddenly accelerated and the nose started to rise,” he said. “But at the time the plane was flying extremely low already. I felt a shock. The oxygen masks fell down and a bad smell began to spread throughout the plane. I could also see sparks in the front part of the plane.” Once the plane landed the cabin was a “mess,” the back of the plane had a large hole and the galley there had disappeared, he wrote on Sina Weibo. Another student passenger described a dark and uncomfortable scene after the crash. “There was dust everywhere and it was very dark. The air smelled horrible. Foam was gushing in and outside the jet,” he told the microblog service Tencent Weibo in an online interview. (SD-Agencies) | 