After the captain ordered an evacuation, Ms Lee said she knew what to do.
"I wasn't really thinking, but my body started carrying out the steps needed for an evacuation," she said.
"I was only thinking about rescuing the next passenger."
When Ms Lee saw that the plane was burning after the crash, she was calm.
"I was only thinking that I should put it out quickly. I didn't have time to feel that this fire was going to hurt me," she said.
Ms Lee said she was the last person off the plane and that she tried to approach the back of the aircraft before she left to make sure that no one was left inside.
But when she moved to the back of the plane, a cloud of black, toxic smoke made it impossible.
"It looked like the ceiling had fallen down," she said.
A passenger, Fei Xiong, told how she and her eight-year-old son looked at each other and sensed something was wrong as the plane came in low over San Francisco Bay.
"My son told me 'The plane will fall down, it's too close to the sea.' I told him 'No, baby, it's OK, we'll be fine.' And then the plane just fell down," Ms Xiong said, moving gingerly with a plastic brace on her injured neck.
Within moments, the aircraft was hurtling out of control, its rear portion ripped off. Baggage was tumbling from the overhead lockers onto passengers, dust filled the plane's fuselage, and the oxygen masks had dropped down. People all around her were screaming.
Ms Xiong, from China, was sitting in the middle of the plane when she felt the strong jolt and her neck flung back and forth violently.
After the plane came to a rest, she grabbed her son and headed for the nearest door, which was open. She said the emergency chute had not deployed, so they jumped to the tarmac.
Near the rear of the aircraft in seat 40C, Wen Zhang said she thought the landing gear had failed when she felt the tail slam against the ground. She, too, was with her young son, aged four.
"I had no time to be scared," she said.