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Inspectors found that the autothrottle had been "armed," or made ready for activation, Hersman said. But investigators are still determining whether it had been engaged. In the last two minutes, there was a lot of use of autopilot and autothrottle, and investigators are going to look into whether pilots made the appropriate commands and if they knew what they were doing, she said.
Experts said the evidence points toward pilot error.
Lee Collins, a pilot with 18,000 hours and 29 years of experience on a variety of airliners, said the question is how the Asiana pilots could make such a "gross error."
"What caused this airplane to crash was their failure to maintain proper airspeed," Collins said.
During the evacuation, many passengers jumped out the back of the plane or slid down inflated slides through emergency exits. Then, say some, an unnerving wait began. 911 tapes recorded frantic callers, pleading for help.
"We've been on the ground, I don't know, 20 minutes, a half hour," said one woman. "There are people laying on the tarmac with critical injuries, head injuries. We're almost losing a woman here. We're trying to keep her alive."
San Francisco Fire Department spokeswoman Mindy Talmadge said Thursday that some passengers who called 911 may not have immediately seen ambulances at the scene because they were dispatched to a nearby staging area as first responders assessed who needed to be taken to the hospital.
"There is a procedure for doing it," Talmadge said. "You don't cause more chaos in an already chaotic situation. You don't do that with 50 ambulances running around all over the place."
Within 18 minutes of receiving word of the crash, five ambulances and more than a dozen other rescue vehicles were at the scene or en route, in addition to airport fire crews and crews from San Mateo County and other agencies already on the scene, Talmadge said.
"Our response was immediate," Talmadge said. "It's not what you may see in the movies. That's not how a real-life response is to a large-scale incident."
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Associated Press writers Joan Lowy in Washington, Terry Collins in San Francisco and Haven Daley in Scotts Valley, Calif., contributed to this report.
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