Asiana Airlines penalized over crash

Asiana Airlines of South Korea has been penalized $500,000 for failing to adequately help family members of passengers on a flight that crashed last year at San Francisco airport, federal transportation officials said Tuesday.

The fine announced by the U.S. Department of Transportation was a first: No airline has previously been found to have broken U.S. laws that require prompt and generous assistance to the loved ones of crash victims.

Three people died and dozens were injured on July 6 last year, when Asiana Flight 214 clipped a seawall while landing.

An investigation by the Department of Transportation concluded that some family members had not been contacted two days after the crash, and it took five days to reach the families of all 291 passengers.

"The last thing families and passengers should have to worry about at such a stressful time is how to get information from their carrier," U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a prepared statement.

Many of the families live in South Korea or China, meaning the airline was their main source of information on the crash half a world away.

In a statement emailed to The Associated Press, Asiana spokeswoman Hyomin Lee said, "Asiana provided extensive support to the passengers and their families following the accident and will continue to do so."

According to a consent order the airline signed with the department, Asiana will pay $400,000 in a fine and $100,000 credited to the airline for costs in sponsoring multiple industry-wide conferences and training sessions in 2013, 2014 and 2015, to provide lessons learned."

Federal investigators also said Asiana did not actively encourage contact from families, failing to widely publicize a toll-free help line until the day after the crash. When family members did call, they were initially routed to a reservations line rather than a crisis hotline.

Asiana also lacked translators and personnel trained in crash response, the transportation department found.

In the late 1990s, after airlines were roundly criticized for ignoring desperate requests for information after crashes, Congress required carriers to dedicate significant attention to families of passengers.

Last fall, the AP reviewed plans filed by two dozen foreign airlines and found cases in which carriers had not updated their family assistance plans as required.

Since the AP's story, several airlines have updated family assistance plans and filed new paperwork with the Department of Transportation. Among them is Asiana's bigger rival, Korean Air.

The Associated Press