The plane caught fire after skidding off the runway and hitting a fence, with the emergency office stating that its landing gear appeared to have malfunctioned; South Korea declares seven-day national mourning period
A passenger plane burst into flames Sunday (December 29, 2024) after it skidded off a runway at a South Korean airport and slammed into a concrete fence when its front landing gear apparently failed to deploy, killing 179 people, officials said, in one of the country’s worst aviation disasters.
The National Fire Agency said the fire was almost put out but officials were still trying to pull people from the Jeju Air passenger plane carrying 181 people at the airport in the town of Muan, about 290 kilometres (180 miles) south of Seoul.
Emergency workers pulled out two people — one passenger and one crew member. It said it deployed 32 fire trucks and several helicopters to contain the fire. The Transport Ministry said the plane was a 15-year-old Boeing 737-800 jet that had arrived from Bangkok and that the crash happened at 9:03 a.m.
Among the 177 bodies so far found, officials have so far identified 88 of them, the fire agency said. The passengers were predominantly South Korean, as well as two Thai nationals. Thailand’s Foreign Ministry said its embassy in Seoul received confirmation from South Korean authorities that the two Thai passengers were among the fatalities.
The fire agency deployed 32 fire trucks and several helicopters to contain the blaze. About 1,570 firefighters, police officers, soldiers and other officials were also sent to the site, according to the fire agency and Transport Ministry.
Both black boxes — the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder — for the plane have been found, a transport official said.
It’s one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea’s aviation history. The last time South Korea suffered a large-scale air disaster was in 1997, when a Korean Airlines plane crashed in Guam, killing 228 people on board.
(With inputs from AP)
