Flight 7C2216 of the South Korean airline Jeju Air, which exploded after landing and skidding off the runway on Sunday at Muan airport, left 179 dead and only two survivors, making it the worst civil aviation accident ever to occur on South Korean soil.
The incident occurred around 9:03 a.m. (00:03 GMT), when the plane, a Boeing 737-800 that had departed hours before from Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok (Thailand), landed in Muan (290 kilometers southwest of Seoul). without having the landing gear deployed and ended up colliding with a wall, which caused the device to explode.
There were 181 people on board, six of the crew (pilot, co-pilot and four assistants) and 175 passengers, of which 173 were South Koreans, mostly people returning from family vacations, and two of Thai nationality.
Six minutes before landing, the control tower issued a collision alert and two minutes later the pilot issued a “mayday” or distress signal.
At that time, images captured by amateurs and eyewitness accounts detailed an apparent impact on the Boeing’s right engine.
The worst air accident in South Korea
It is the air accident with the highest number of fatalities that occurred in South Korean territory and the third among those involving a South Korean company after the two Korean Air accidents in 1983, when a Soviet fighter shot down one of its Boeing 747s, causing the death of its 269. occupants, and 1997, when another of their Jumbos crashed on the island of Guam with a death toll of 229 and 25 survivors.
A few hours after the rescue operation began, emergency teams warned that the chances of finding more people alive, beyond the two flight attendants who survived in the tail of the plane, were extremely low because many were ejected. after the collision against the wall and the explosion, which affected a good part of the device.
Of the 175 passengers, 93 were women and 82 men, with most of the passengers between 40 and 60 years old, although the victims included five children under 10 and another nine who did not reach the age of 20.
Read: At least 85 people die after plane crashes in South Korea
At the moment the authorities, who are already investigating the accident, believe that the cause of the accident could be the failure to deploy the landing gear and other braking mechanisms, possibly due to a collision with a bird.
The two black boxes have been found hours after the accident, although the South Korean Ministry of Transport has reported that the flight data recorder (FDR) has suffered damage, and that therefore it could take between one and six months to decode it.
In total, the impact has so far led to the deployment of some 2,800 members of the fire brigade, police, Armed Forces and Coast Guard.
Seven days of national mourning
South Korean interim President Choi Sang-mok declared Muan County a special disaster-affected area when visiting the accident site and also announced seven days of national mourning starting Sunday, in addition to offering his condolences to the families of the victims.
The incident occurred at a time of greatest political turbulence in recent decades in South Korea.
Choi, who is deputy prime minister and head of Finance, had only assumed the interim presidency on Friday, the day Parliament dismissed his predecessor, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who in turn temporarily replaced President Yoon. Suk-yeol, also dismissed by the legislature on December 14 due to his declaration of martial law at the beginning of the month.
Jeju Air CEO Kim E-bae apologized to the families of the victims, said the company will spare no effort to support them, and took responsibility for the accident “regardless of the causes” of the accident.
However, Kim was received with anger by the relatives of the deceased, apparently because it took him 11 hours to show up at the Muan airport.
With information from EFE
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