LOS ANGELES (AP) — Asiana Airlines has been penalized
$500,000 for failing to assist 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 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 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 gets a $100,000 credit 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 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.
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Contact Justin Pritchard at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman
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