(Update) Jeju plane crash death toll now at 176; 3 missing

Yonhap, Philippine News Agency

The accident happened at around 9 a.m. when the Jeju Air plane, carrying 175 passengers and six crew members, veered off the runway while landing at Muan International Airport in the Muan county, South Jeolla Province, about 288 kilometers southwest of Seoul. (File Photo: weichen_kh/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

MUAN – A passenger jet carrying 181 people belly-landed and exploded at an airport in South Korea’s southwestern county of Muan on Sunday, leaving 176 people dead and three others missing, authorities said.

Two crew members survived.

It marked yet another deadly aviation disaster in the country’s history, and the worst involving a local airline since the fatal 1997 Korean Air plane crash in Guam that killed 225.

The accident happened at around 9 a.m. when the Jeju Air plane, carrying 175 passengers and six crew members, veered off the runway while landing at Muan International Airport in the Muan county, South Jeolla Province, about 288 kilometers southwest of Seoul.

The plane skidded along the ground without its landing gear deployed, crashing into a concrete wall before bursting into flames with a deafening explosion.

The authorities confirmed 176 deaths from the accident and classified the remaining three as missing persons.

They said search operations will continue overnight to find the three who are still unaccounted for.

Earlier, the authorities said they had identified 22 victims.

“After the plane collided with the wall, passengers were thrown out of the aircraft. The chances of survival are extremely low,” a firefighting agency official said.

The 181 people were aboard the Boeing 737-800 plane that had departed from Bangkok at 1:30 a.m. It was scheduled to arrive in Muan at around 8:30 a.m.

Most of the passengers were Koreans, except for two Thai nationals.

Of those on board, 82 were men and 93 were women, ranging in age from as young as three to 78 years old.

Many were in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

Only the two crew members survived the accident as they were rescued shortly after the crash. They were treated at separate hospitals in Mokpo and have now been transported to Seoul.

Their injuries were not life-threatening.

Bird strike

Officials believe the landing gear failure, possibly due to a bird strike, may have caused the accident. They began an on-site investigation to determine the exact cause.

The land ministry said in a briefing that an airport control tower had warned of a bird strike just six minutes before the crash.

One minute later, the plane declared “Mayday,” an international distress signal sent from a plane in a critical situation.

The South Jeolla authorities raised emergency alerts to the highest levels and deployed all available rescue and police personnel to the accident site.

Acting President Choi Sang-mok declared the Muan county as a special disaster zone as he visited the crash site to instruct officials to make all-out efforts for search operations.

Choi also expressed deep condolences to the bereaved family members and promised to offer them all possible government assistance.

The presidential office convened an emergency meeting of top secretaries earlier in the day and decided to maintain a round-the-clock emergency system for timely responses to the search and other operations. (Yonhap)