At least 177 people were killed yesterday in the deadliest air accident ever in South Korea, where an airliner belly-landed and veered off the runway, erupting in a fireball as it slammed into a wall at Muan International Airport.
Jeju Air flight 7C2216, arriving from the Thai capital, Bangkok, with 175 passengers and six crew on board, was attempting to land shortly after 9am at the airport in the south of the country, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said.
Two crew members were rescued, and officials have suggested the final two missing people were presumed dead.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The deadliest air accident on South Korean soil was also the worst involving a South Korean airline in nearly three decades, the transportation ministry said.
The twin-engine Boeing 737-800 was seen in a local media video skidding down the runway with no visible landing gear before crashing into the wall in an explosion of flames and debris.
“Only the tail part retains a little bit of shape, and the rest of [the plane] looks almost impossible to recognize,” Muan Fire Department Chief Lee Jung-hyun told a news briefing.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The two crew members, a man and a woman, were rescued from the tail section of the burning plane, Lee said.
They were being treated at hospitals with medium to severe injuries, the head of the local public health center said.
Investigators are examining bird strikes and weather conditions as possible factors, Lee said.
Photo: AFP
Yonhap news agency cited airport authorities as saying a bird strike might have caused the landing gear to malfunction.
Experts said the bird strike report and the way the aircraft attempted to land raised more questions than answers.
“A bird strike is not unusual, problems with an undercarriage are not unusual,” Airline News editor Geoffrey Thomas said. “Bird strikes happen far more often, but typically they don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves.”
South Korea’s acting President Choi Sang-mok, in an emergency meeting yesterday evening, declared a national mourning period until Saturday.
Hours after the crash, family members gathered in the airport’s arrival area, some crying and hugging as Red Cross volunteers handed out blankets.
Families screamed and wept loudly as a medic announced the names of 22 victims identified by their fingerprints. Papers were circulated for families to write down their contact details.
One relative stood at a microphone to ask for more information from the authorities.
“My older brother died and I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Mortuary vehicles lined up outside to take bodies away, and the authorities said a temporary morgue had been established.
Yesterday’s passengers included two Thai nationals, while the rest are believed to be South Koreans, the transportation ministry said.
No Taiwanese were on board, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
The control tower issued a bird strike warning, and shortly afterward the pilots declared mayday and then attempted to land, a South Korean transportation ministry official said.
A passenger texted a relative to say a bird was stuck in the wing, the News1 agency reported. The person’s final message was “Should I say my last words?”
The crash is the worst for any South Korean airline since a 1997 Korean Air crash in Guam that killed more than 200 people, transportation ministry data showed. The previous worst on South Korean soil was an Air China Ltd (中國國際航空) crash that killed 129 in 2002.
In Taipei, President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday expressed his heartfelt condolences on behalf of the government and the people of Taiwan “to the families of those who lost their lives in the crash,” the Presidential Office said in a statement.
Department of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Director Peter Lan (藍夏禮) extended the government’s condolences to South Korean Representative to Taiwan Lee Eun-ho, while Taiwan’s Representative to South Korea Liang Kuang-chung (梁光中) extended the government’s sympathies to Seoul, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a news release.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reminded Taiwanese living in or traveling to South Korea to call its representative office in Seoul in case of an emergency at +82-10-9080-2761 or its branch office in Busan at +82-10-4537-7961.
Additional reporting by CNA
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
RSS