Veteran Flight Attendant, Passenger Seen As Heroes of Asiana 214
By wchung | 19 May, 2025

Asiana Airlines cabin manager Lee Yoon-hye is being recognized as one of the heroes in Saturday’s crash of Flight 214 at San Francisco International Airport. Another is an American passenger named Benjamin Levy.

Lee was the last person to leave the burning Boeing 777 after a violent crash landing tore off the tail end of the plane’s fuselage as well as one of the engines. She had suffered a fractured tailbone during the crash but calmly helped evacuate passengers and put our fires, then checked the plane all the way back to the caved-in tail section to make sure no one was left behind before leaving the plane.

“She was a hero,” business-class passenger Eugene Anthony Rah told The Wall Street Journal. “This tiny, little girl was carrying people piggyback, running everywhere, with tears running down her face. She was crying, but she was still so calm and helping people.”

“She was so composed I thought she had come from the terminal,” said San Francisco fire chief Joanne Hayes-White who had spoken with Lee just after the evacuation. “She wanted to make sure that everyone was off. She was a hero.”

“I wasn’t really thinking, but my body started carrying out the steps needed for an evacuation,” Lee said of her state of mind after the captain order the plane’s evaucation. “I was only thinking about rescuing the next passenger.”

Before exiting the burning aircraft Lee made her way to the back of the aircraft for a final check. But as she approached the back she was blocked by a cloud of black smoke that was quickly filling the cabin.

“It looked like the ceiling had fallen down,” she said.

All 307 passengers and crew aboard the flight were evacuated though two 16-year-old Chinese girls were found dead, one on either side of the plane. Over 180 were severely injured. The successful evacuation of the entire cabin seen as remarkable feat during the short interval between the crash landing and the filling of the cabin by smoke.

It’s even more remarkable because two of the evacuation slides on the doors inflated into the cabin instead of outward, pinning two flight attendants to the floor. Crew members had to first deflate the slides with axes to free the attendants.

The crew is seen as having acquitted themselves remarkably well during the moments following the crash. One flight attendant put a scared elementary schoolboy on her back and slid down a slide, according to the first remarks made by Lee to a gathering of reporters at a San Francisco hotel following the crash. A pilot waited until all the passengers were evacuated, before helping an injured flight attendant off the plane.

The successful evacuation was also aided by passengers like Benjamin Levy who had been sitting in seat 30K. After helping to open one of the emergency exits he directed about three-dozen fellow passengers off the plane before joining them.

“It’s incredible to see what these flight attendants were able to accomplish — with half the doors,” said Leslie Mayo, a flight attendant for American Airlines on 777s and national communications coordinator for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants.

During the news briefing in which she described the crash and its aftermath Lee was forced to stand because of her broken tailbone. She said she didn’t know the seriousness of her injury until she was treated by a doctor at a San Francisco hospital.

The co-pilot who was piloting during the crash had flown a Boeing 777 just nine times for a total of only 43 hours though he had logged nearly 10,000 hours on other airliners. He told investigators that he realized he was flying too slow and too low, and tried to abort the landing and go back up in the air. Investigators believe the landing gear may have struck the lip of the landing strip, causing the plane to crash.

“Right before touchdown, I felt like the plane was trying to take off,” said Lee, the cabin manager. “I was thinking, ‘What’s happening?’ and then I felt a bang. 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.”

Lee, 40, has been with Asiana for nearly 20 years. The crash was the first accident involving a Korean airliner in 12 years.