2024 Is Taking Passengers Of Major Airlines Up to The Last Minute "JinLee Your Mom is Not Coming Home"

 

Choe Sang-HunJohn Yoon and Jin Yu YoungChoe Sang-hun and Jin Yu Young reported from Seoul, and John Yoon from Muan, South Korea.

Here are the latest developments.

A passenger plane crashed while landing at an airport in southwestern South Korea on Sunday, killing almost all of the 181 people on board in the worst aviation disaster involving a South Korean airline in almost three decades, officials said.

The Boeing 737-800 plane, operated by South Korea’s Jeju Air, had taken off from Bangkok and was landing at Muan International Airport when it crashed around 9 a.m. local time. Footage of the accident shows a white-and-orange plane speeding down a runway on its belly until it overshoots the runway, hitting a barrier and exploding into an orange fireball.

Two crew members were rescued from the aircraft’s tail section, but by Sunday evening, the other 179 people on board had all been confirmed dead. Officials were investigating what caused the tragedy, including why the plane’s landing gear appeared to have malfunctioned, whether birds had struck the jet, or if bad weather had been a factor.

The airport in Muan had warned the plane’s pilots about a potential bird strike as they were landing, said Ju Jong-wan, a director of aviation policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. The plane issued a mayday alert shortly afterward, then crash-landed, he added, saying later that the plane’s black boxes — which should help determine the cause of the crash — have been recovered.

Jeju Air flight 7C2216 had 175 passengers and six crew members on board. Hundreds of people — grandparents, parents and children — packed the Muan airport waiting anxiously for news about their loved ones.

More than 1,500 people were deployed to help search the wreckage. As investigators worked to identify the bodies, officials posted lists in the airport of the names that had been confirmed and collected DNA from relatives.

Lee Jeong-hyeon, an official in charge of search and rescue operations at the scene, said the plane had broken into so many pieces that only its tail was identifiable.

“We could not recognize the rest of the fuselage,” he said.

Here’s what else to know about the crash:

Photos from the South Korean news agency Yonhap showed a tail section of the plane separated and engulfed in orange flames with black smoke billowing up. The plane appears to have hit a concrete wall, according to the photos.

The crash of the Jeju Air jet was most likely the deadliest worldwide since that of Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018, when all 189 people on board died as the plane plunged into the Java Sea. It also was the worst involving a South Korean airline since 1997, when a Korean Air jet slammed into a hill in the U.S. territory of Guam, killing 229 of the 254 people on board.

Jeju Air apologized for the crash in a brief statement. The crash on Sunday appears to have been the first fatal one for the airline, a low-cost South Korean carrier that was established in 2005 and flies to dozens of countries in Asia.

Thailand’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that two Thai citizens were among the dead.

South Korea has been dealing with a political crisis at the highest levels. President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was impeached this month after a short-lived martial law decree shocked and angered the nation, wrote on social media on Sunday that he was devastated by the accident. South Korea’s acting president, Choi Sang-mok, said the country would observe a weeklong period of mourning.

Yan Zhuang and Sui-Lee Wee contributed reporting.

The plane crash is the deadliest on South Korean soil.

 

The smoking wreckage of a plane seen from a grassy hill.

The crash site of a Korean Air jet in Guam in 1997.Credit...Choo Youn-Kong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The crash of the Jeju Air passenger plane that killed 179 people on Sunday is the deadliest aviation disaster to have taken place in South Korea, a country that has worked hard for years to build a solid air travel safety record.

Sunday’s tragedy is also likely to have been the deadliest plane crash since Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the Java Sea in 2018, according to reports from the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency. The Lion Air plane crashed shortly after takeoff from the Indonesian capital, killing all 189 people onboard.

South Korea suffered some of the worst plane crashes in the 1980s and 1990s before tightening its protocols as its airline industry grew. Globally, airline safety improved after the International Civil Aviation Organization introduced stricter universal guidelines in 1999, according to Keith Tonkin, an aviation expert. South Korea not only met those guidelines but has achieved some of the highest air travel safety scores since.

South Korea has scored above the global average in the universal safety audit. In the latest figures, South Korea scored 98.59 percent for safety and 98.57 percent for security for its compliance with international safety standards, according to figures published by the country’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. Jeju Air was among the airlines that received the highest safety rating.

“That’s very difficult to achieve,” Mr. Tonkin, a managing director of Aviation Projects, an aviation consulting company in Australia, said, referring to South Korea’s safety record. “It takes very significant diligence and effort.”

Alongside the international guidelines, South Korea’s Office of Civil Aviation also established strict safety protocols. It was part of the government’s stated goal to “lead the Pan Pacific region as an aviation powerhouse.”

The crash at Muan International Airport on Sunday was the worst aviation accident involving a South Korean passenger airline since 1997, when a Korean Air jet slammed into a hill in Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific. The cause of that crash, which killed 229 of the 254 people on board, was pilot error, officials said at the time. In 1993, an Asiana Airlines Boeing 737-500 also crashed into a mountain, killing 66 of the 110 people on board.

The previous decade saw even more tragedy. In July 1989, a Korean Air flight en route from Seoul crashed after it missed the runway at the Tripoli airport in Libya. The plane’s manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, said at the time that poor visibility and heavy fog probably led to the DC-10 jetliner crashing into nearby homes and cars. At least 75 people were killed, including four on the ground.

Two years earlier, in November 1987, a Korean Air Boeing 707 jetliner crashed in the jungle near the border of Thailand and Myanmar, killing 115 people. At the time, Korean Air said the crash was probably the result of a terrorist attack.