All the 179 people aboard a passenger jet that crashed while landing at an airport in southwest South Korea were confirmed dead except only two rescued, multiple media outlets said Sunday citing the fire authorities, APA reports.
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16:23
A passenger jet carrying 181 people belly-landed and exploded at an airport in South Korea's southwestern county of Muan on Sunday, leaving 177 people dead and two others missing, authorities said. Two crew members survived, APA reports citing Yonhap.
It marked yet another deadliest aviation disaster in the country's history, and the worst involving a local airline since the deadly 1997 Korean Air plane crash in Guam that killed 225.
The accident happened at around 9 a.m. when the Jeju Air plane, carrying 175 passengers and six crew members, veered off the runway while landing at Muan International Airport in the Muan county, South Jeolla Province, about 288 kilometers southwest of Seoul.
The plane skidded along the ground without its landing gear deployed, crashing into a concrete wall before bursting into flames with a deafening explosion.
The authorities confirmed 177 deaths from the accident and said two crew members were rescued, with the remaining two classified as missing.
They said search operations will continue overnight to find the two who are still unaccounted for. Earlier, the authorities said they had identified 22 victims.
"After the plane collided with the wall, passengers were thrown out of the aircraft. The chances of survival are extremely low," a firefighting agency official said.
"The aircraft has almost completely been destroyed, and it is difficult to identify the deceased," the official said. "We are in the process of recovering the remains, which will take time."
The 181 people were aboard the Boeing 737-800 plane that had departed from Bangkok at 1:30 a.m. It was scheduled to arrive in Muan at around 8:30 a.m.
Most of the passengers were Koreans, except for two Thai nationals.
Of those on board, 82 were men and 93 were women, ranging in age from as young as three to 78 years old. Many were in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
A temporary morgue has been set up inside the Muan airport to lay the bodies of the victims.
Only the two crew members survived the accident as they were rescued shortly after the crash. They were treated at separate hospitals in Mokpo and have now been transported to Seoul. Their injuries were not life-threatening.
Officials believe the landing gear failure, possibly due to a bird strike, may have caused the accident. They began an on-site investigation to determine the exact cause.
The land ministry said in a briefing that an airport control tower had warned of a bird strike just six minutes before the crash.
One minute later, the pilot of the Jeju Air plane declared "Mayday," an international distress signal sent from a plane in a critical situation.
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12:57
South Korea's transport ministry said on Sunday that its investigation unit secured both of the two black boxes from a crashed passenger jet that has killed at least 167, APA reports citing Xinhua.
An official with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a televised press briefing that the retrieval of both flight data and voice recorders was completed to look into the exact cause of the accident.
The passenger plane with 175 passengers, including 173 South Koreans and two Thais, as well as six flight attendants on board crashed while attempting to land at the Muan International Airport, some 290 km southwest of the capital Seoul, at about 9:07 a.m. local time (0007 GMT) on Sunday.
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