The flight, operated by Jeju Air, was landing when it went off the runway in Muan, in the country’s southwest. Only two people survived the crash.
Here are the latest developments.
A passenger plane crashed while landing at an airport in 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 was operated by South Korea’s Jeju Air and had taken off from Bangkok. It was landing at Muan International Airport in the country’s southwest 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 could 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.
