A plane from Bangkok with 181 people on board crashed and caught fire on Sunday when landing at Muan airport in southwestern South Korea, killing at least 47 people.
“We have so far confirmed the deaths of 29 people,” Lee Hyeon-ji, head of the South Jeolla Province Fire Department response team, told AFP. “But the toll could rise due to the number of serious injuries,” she added.
Several passengers were extracted by firefighters from the rear of the plane, Ms. Lee said. Firefighters later clarified that at least two people, a passenger and a crew member, had been saved.
According to authorities, the accident occurred at 9:03 a.m. local time on Sunday. The plane from Bangkok of the South Korean company Jeju Air, which was carrying 175 passengers, including two Thai nationals and six crew members, crashed and caught fire when landing in Muan, a town located approximately 290 kilometers south of the capital Seoul.
Engulfed in flames
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 entire device is then engulfed in flames.
The crash appeared to have been caused by “contact with birds, leading to a malfunction of the landing gear,” South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported. The plane landed on its belly and caught fire when it hit a fence at the end of the runway, she added.
Images broadcast by South Korean television channels on Sunday morning showed numerous emergency service vehicles and dozens of firefighters working around the wreckage of the plane, completely charred except for the tail, and evacuating bodies wrapped in blue shrouds on stretchers.
Acting South Korean President Choi Sang-mok has called an emergency government meeting. “All relevant agencies… must mobilize all available resources to save people,” he ordered in a statement.
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.
Plane accidents are very rare in South Korea.
Last year, a passenger opened an emergency exit on an Asiana Airlines plane about to land. The aircraft was able to land normally, but several people were hospitalized.
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