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.
Ms Zhang picked up her child, who had hit the seat in front of him and broke his left leg. Unhurt, she could see a hole that ripped open at the back of the jumbo jet where the bathroom had been and carried her son to safety.
"It left a hole very close to my seat," she said. "Enough for two persons to get out."
Sitting near Ms Zhang was 39-year-old Shi Da, who was travelling with his wife and teenage son.
He was shocked by the violent shaking of the crash, then the realisation that the back of the plane had ripped off. He stood up and could see the tail, but the kitchen was missing with nothing but a hole, he said.
"I can see through the hole to see the runway and the ground," he said. "So we just grabbed our bags and rushed out from the tail, from the hole."
The passengers who made it out sat on the tarmac for half an hour waiting for buses and watching the aircraft go up in flames as firefighters hosed it down. Ambulances took the badly injured away, but 123 people walked away with little injury.
Many didn't have their passports, mobile phones or money.
Mr Da's friend picked him and his family up, took them out to dinner, then they went to a Target store to buy clothes because their luggage is missing, presumed destroyed.
Most survivors suffered minor injuries, and were just starting to realise how close they'd come to death.
"I just feel lucky." Mr Da said. "We are so lucky."
The San Francisco fire chief, Joanne Hayes-White, praised the cabin manager, who she talked to just after the evacuation.
"She was so composed I thought she had come from the terminal," Hayes-White told reporters in a clip posted to YouTube.
"She wanted to make sure that everyone was off ... She was a hero."