By BCN
Burlingame resident Kate Belding was out for a jog when she saw Asiana Airlines flight No. 214 crash and catch fire as it landed at San Francisco International Airport late this morning.
She was running along a Bay trail near the Crowne Plaza hotel in Burlingame, south of the airport, when something about the plane caught her eye as it was approaching the runway, which juts out into the water.
"It was too low or it was too slow, or something about it just looked different than it should have looked," Belding said.
She said that when it touched down, she saw what looked like a small cloud of smoke.
"I thought that was a little bit weird, different from what you would usually see," she said.
Then it became clear something was very wrong when she heard a loud bang and saw the Boeing 777 skidding on the ground with its wings angled up in the air rather than parallel to the ground, Belding said.
She heard a second bang and saw a dark gray plume of smoke, she said.
A couple of minutes later, emergency vehicles began to arrive on the runway, she said.
She thought, "I can't believe I'm witnessing this," and ran over to talk with some people walking their dogs who were in similar disbelief."
"I run over there a lot, so you see planes coming in and out all the time, it's just part of our daily life here," said Belding, who is 56.
The crash killed two people and sent dozens to hospitals, including 10 critically injured patients who were taken to San Francisco General Hospital.
National Transportation Safety Board chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman and other NTSB officials took off on a flight from Washington D.C. this afternoon to San Francisco to investigate the crash.
Hersman said at a news conference in Washington that other NTSB officials from Los Angeles were also traveling to San Francisco to join the probe of the crash.
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