A Jeju Air plane with 181 people on board crashed and caught fire on Sunday upon landing in Muan, South Korea, apparently following a collision with birds, an accident that left the least 120 dead.
The chances of finding other survivors, in addition to the two crew members extracted from the burning carcass shortly after the crash, diminished as the day progressed, several hours after firefighters brought the flames under control.
According to the authorities, the accident of flight JJA-2216 which linked Bangkok to Muan (southwest), one of the deadliest in the history of South Korea, occurred on Sunday at 9:03 a.m. (00:03 GMT).
The plane was carrying 175 passengers, including two Thai nationals, and six crew members.
A probable “collision with birds”
“The cause of the accident is presumed to be a collision with birds combined with adverse weather conditions. However, the exact cause will be announced after an investigation,” Lee Jeong-hyun, head of the fire station in Muan, a city about 290 kilometers south of Seoul, told a press briefing. .
“The passengers were ejected from the plane when it collided with a barrier, leaving them with little chance of survival,” a local fire official said during a meeting with the victims’ families.
“The plane is almost completely destroyed and the identification of the deceased is proving difficult,” he added.
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 then appeared to hit an obstacle at the end of the runway and was immediately engulfed in flames.
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.
“An emergency government meeting”
Acting South Korean President Choi Sang-mok chaired an emergency government meeting and will travel to Muan on Sunday afternoon, his office said. “All agencies concerned (…) must mobilize all available resources to save people,” he ordered in a press release.
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 accidents are very rare in South Korea.
In May 2023, a passenger opened an emergency exit of an Asiana Airlines Airbus A321-200 about to land at Daegu Airport in the southeast of the country. The aircraft was able to land normally, but several people were hospitalized.
The most serious plane accident to take place in South Korea remains the crash on a hill near Busan-Gimhae Airport of an Air China Boeing 767 from Beijing, which killed 129 people. died April 15, 2002.
Before Sunday’s accident, the last fatal accident at a South Korean airline was that of an Asiana Boeing 777 which missed its landing at San Francisco airport, killing three people and injuring 182 on July 6. 2013.
The deadliest disaster for a South Korean airline remains that of a Korean Air Boeing 747 flying from New York to Seoul via Anchorage (Alaska), which was shot down by a Soviet fighter over the Sea of Japan, causing the death of 246 passengers and 23 crew members on September 1, 1983.
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