NTSB: Evacuation Delayed About 90 Seconds

The NTSB says that the evacuation of Asiana Flight 214 was delayed by about 90 seconds because the pilot told the flight attendants to keep the passengers in their seats.

In a briefing held Wednesday, NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman (pictured) said that two of the emergency slides aboard the plane deployed inside the cabin, effectively pinning two of the 12 flight attendants on board. Bloomberg News reports that the evacuation did not begin until one of the senior flight attendants saw a fire begin in the right engine and notified the captain. The fire did not reach the cabin until everyone had been evacuated from the plane, Hersman said.

Hersman also said that three of the flight attendants sitting in the rear of the plane on landing were ejected from the fuselage by the impact. That number had originally been reported as two.

Hersman said that the pilot's decision not to immediately evacuate the airplane was not necessarily wrong. She said sometimes crews wait for emergency responders to arrive to help assure the safe evacuation of an airplane. "The pilots are in the front of the airplane," she said. "The really don't have a good sense of what's going on behind them."

FMI: www.ntsb.gov