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Timothée L'Angevin
Published on
Dec 29 2024 at 7:42 a.m.
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Drama to Muan, in the southwest of the South Korea. This Sunday, December 28, at 9 a.m. (1 a.m. in France), Jeju Air plane carrying 181 people crashes and caught fire upon landing. We are currently counting at least 120 dead, according to firefighters.
What happened?
A video broadcast by local channel MBC shows the aircraft – a Boeing 737-8AS which entered service in 2009, according to the specialist site Flightradar – landing with smoke escaping from the engines. The plane hit a wall at the end of the runway and was immediately engulfed in flames.
According to authorities, the cause of the accident of flight JJA-2216, one of the deadliest in South Korean history, “is presumed to be a collision with birds combined with unfavorable weather conditions.”
Why are bird collisions so dangerous?
Hitting birds in flight is the dread of pilots, especially when it comes to jet planes whose engines can quickly lose power or even stop completely after ingesting a bird.
However, the exact cause will be announced after an investigation,” Lee Jeong-hyun, head of the Muan Fire Station, said at a press briefing.
Images broadcast by South Korean television channels show numerous emergency service vehicles and dozens of firefighters working around the carcass of the plane, completely charred except for the tail, and evacuating on stretchers of bodies wrapped in blue shrouds.
How many victims?
The plane was carrying 175 passengers, most of them Korean, and two Thai nationals, and six crew members between Bangkok and Muan, a city located about 290 kilometers south of the capital Seoul.
There are currently 120 deaths. But the toll could still rise.
The passengers were thrown from the plane when it collided with a barrier, leaving them with little chance of survival. The plane was almost completely destroyed and the identification of the deceased proved difficult.
Only two people survived.
More plane crashes in South Korea?
This is the first fatal accident in the history of Jeju Air, one of South Korea's largest low-cost airlines, founded in 2005.
On August 12, 2007, a Jeju Air Bombardier Q400 carrying 74 passengers went off the runway in strong winds at Busan-Gimhae airport (south), causing around ten minor injuries.
“Jeju Air will do everything in its power to deal with this accident. We offer our sincere apologies,” the company wrote in a statement published on its social networks on Sunday.
Plane crashes are very rare in South Korea. The deadliest to have occurred in the country was the crash on a hill near Busan-Gimhae airport of an Air China Boeing 767 coming from Beijing, which left 129 dead on April 15, 2002.
With AFP
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