Cebuana, kids among plane crash survivors

A US-based Cebuana on vacation with her two sons, aged 5 and 7, were among the 305 people who survived Sunday’s crash of Asiana Airline Flight 214 crash in San Francisco, California.

Two other Filipino-Americans, couple Ruben Vallero, 75 and Belen Vallero, 73 survived the plane crash that killed two teenage Chinese passengers.

Maricel Anino Knaus, 38, an American citizen has been living in the US for 12 years.

The five Filipino-Americans are now out of the hospital after sustaining various injuries.

Relatives of Knaus in Cebu City earlier sought the help of ABS-CBN in checking the condition of the woman and her family, who had spent a month long vacation in the Philippines and were heading back to the US when the tragedy occured.

The relatives, who requested anonymity said the children were traumatized and refused to take another flight from San Francisco to Colorado.

They instead took a six-hour land trip to their home in Fort Collins, Colorado after they were discharged from Stanford Hospital.

The Philippine Embassy earlier announced that no Filipinos were on board the ill-fated Boeing 777 aircraft of Asiana Airline because they were told by American officials that “no Philippine passport holders and no Filipino-sounding names were among US passport holders” on the flight.

Asian Airline flight 214 carried 291 passengers and 16 crew.

More than 180 people onboard the plane went to hospitals with injuries. More than a third of them didn’t even require hospitalization.

The passengers included 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans, 64 Americans, three Canadians, three Indians, one Japanese, one Vietnamese and one person from France.

South Korean officials said 39 people remained hospitalized in different hospitals in San Francisco. The flight originated in Shanghai, China, and stopped over in Seoul, South Korea, before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco.

Authorities continue to investigate what caused the plane crash in the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) that occurred on July 6 in the U.S or July 7 Philippine time. With an Inquirer report