Sight of grief: The wreckage of Jeju Air flight 2216 at Muan International Airport in Muan County, South Korea. — Bloomberg
At least 179 people were killed in the deadliest air accident ever in South Korea yesterday, when an airliner belly-landed and veered off the runway, erupting in a fireball as it slammed into a wall at Muan International Airport.
Jeju Air flight 7C2216, arriving from the Thai capital Bangkok with 175 passengers and six crew on board, was attempting to land shortly after 9am (0000 GMT) at the airport in the south of the country, South Korea’s transport ministry said.
Two crew members were rescued, and officials have suggested the rest on board are presumed dead.
The deadliest air accident on South Korean soil was also the worst involving a South Korean airline in nearly three decades, according to the transport ministry.
The twin-engine Boeing 737-800 was seen in local media video skidding down the runway with no visible landing gear before crashing into the wall in an explosion of flames and debris.
“Only the tail part retains a little bit of shape, and the rest of (the plane) looks almost impossible to recognise,” Muan fire chief Lee Jung-hyun told a briefing.
The two crew members, a man and a woman, were rescued from the tail section of the burning plane, Lee said. They were being treated at hospitals with medium to severe injuries, said the head of the local public health centre.
Deep sorrow: Jeju Air CEO Kim (fourth from left) and officials bow to apologise for their plane’s incident at the press conference in Seoul. (Below) A relative of a passenger crying after hearing the news. — Reuters
Investigators are examining bird strikes and weather conditions as possible factors, Lee said. Yonhap news agency cited airport authorities as saying a bird strike may have caused the landing gear to malfunction.
Authorities were searching nearby areas for bodies possibly thrown from the plane, Lee said.
Hours after the crash, family members gathered in the airport’s arrival area, some crying and hugging as Red Cross volunteers handed out blankets.
Families screamed and wept loudly as a medic announced the names of 22 victims identified by their fingerprints.
One relative stood at a microphone to ask for more information from authorities. “My older brother died and I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Another asked journalists not to film. “We are not monkeys in a zoo,” he said. “We are the bereaved families.”
Mortuary vehicles lined up outside to take bodies away, and authorities said a temporary morgue had been established.
The crash site smelled of aviation fuel and blood, according to witnesses, and workers in protective suits and masks combed the area while soldiers searched through bushes.
The crash is the worst for any South Korean airline since a 1997 Korean Air crash in Guam that killed more than 200 people, according to transportation ministry data.
The previous worst on South Korean soil was an Air China crash that killed 129 in 2002.
The control tower issued a bird strike warning and shortly afterward the pilots declared mayday and then pilots attempted to land, a transport ministry official said.
A passenger texted a relative to say a bird was stuck in the wing, the News1 agency reported. The person’s final message was, “Should I say my last words?”
The passengers included two Thai nationals and the rest are believed to be South Koreans, the transportation ministry said.
The two CFM56-7B26 engines were manufactured by CFM International, a joint venture between GE Aerospace and France’s Safran, it added.
Jeju Air CEO Kim E-bae apologised for the accident, bowing deeply during a televised briefing.
He said the 2009 aircraft had no record of accidents and there were no early signs of malfunction. The airline will cooperate with investigators and make supporting the bereaved its top priority, Kim said.
No abnormal conditions were reported when the aircraft left Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, said Kerati Kijmanawat, president of Airports of Thailand.
It is the first fatal flight for Jeju Air, a low-cost airline founded in 2005 that ranks behind only Korean Air Lines and Asiana Airlines in terms of the number of passengers in South Korea.
The accident happened three weeks after Jeju Air started regular flights from Muan to Bangkok and other Asian cities on Dec 8.Muan International is one of South Korea’s smallest airports but it has seen the number of international passengers jump nearly 20 times to 310,702 from January to November from the same period in 2022, according to government data.
All domestic and international flights at Muan airport had been cancelled. — Reuters
