SOUTH KOREA PLANE CRASH KILLS 179

One hundred and seventy-nine people were killed yesterday morning as a South Korean passenger jet crashed and burst into flames on landing, according to local authorities. 

The accident was one of the country’s worst aviation disasters. The Jeju Air flight was returning from Bangkok with 181 people on board when it failed to deploy its landing gear. It skid down the runway before it struck a wall and was engulfed in fire at Muan International Airport in the country’s south.

Two crew members were rescued from the aircraft’s tail, according to the national fire agency, but all the other people on the flight were later confirmed to have been killed, officials told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. South Korea’s acting president Choi Sang-mok — who assumed office on Friday after his predecessor was impeached by parliament — vowed to “dig into the cause and take steps to prevent any recurrence of similar accidents”. “This is a grave situation. We will do our utmost to cope with the damage,” he said. The crash was the worst commercial aviation disaster since 2018.

Footage of the crash aired by South Korean television channels showed the plane skidding across the airstrip at high speed, apparently with its landing gear still closed, overrunning the runway and colliding head-on with a concrete wall on the outskirts of the facility, triggering an explosion. Other local TV stations aired footage showing thick plumes of black smoke billowing from the plane, which was engulfed in flames.
Lee Jeong-hyeon, chief of the Muan fire station, told a televised briefing that the plane was completely destroyed, with only the tail assembly remaining recognizable among the wreckage. Lee said that workers were looking into various possibilities about what caused the crash, including whether the aircraft was struck by birds.

In a televised news conference, Kim E-bae, Jeju Air’s president, bowed deeply with other senior company officials as he apologized to bereaved families and said he feels “full responsibility” for the incident. Kim said the company hadn’t identified any mechanical problems with the aircraft following regular checkups and that he would wait for the results of government investigations into the cause of the incident.

thewyreng