179 killed and two rescued @ Jeju Air flight 7C2216
Seoul, Dec 29 (EFE).-
Firefighters have confirmed that 179 people were killed and two rescued after Jeju Air flight 7C2216 exploded at the Muan International Airport in South Korea on Sunday.
Rescue teams announced at 8:38 pm, almost 12 hours after the accident, that the last of the missing people who were traveling on board the aircraft had been found, local news agency Yonhap reported.
Several hours earlier, authorities had already indicated that there was no hope of finding any more of the 181 people on board alive, of whom only two, both crew members who were in the back of the plane, have been rescued alive.
So far, 77 of the 179 people who died in the plane crash have been identified, which has been confirmed as the worst ever to occur on South Korean soil.
Among the 181 people on board were the pilot, the co-pilot and four flight attendants, as well as 175 passengers, of whom 173 were South Korean and two Thai.
The accident occurred at around 9:03, when the plane, a Boeing 737-800 that had departed hours earlier from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, landed at its destination, Muan airport, and crashed into a concrete fence after veering off the runway.
The control tower at Muan International Airport, located 290 kilometers southwest of Seoul, issued a bird collision alert for the flight six minutes before landing, which occurred without the plane activating the landing gear and other braking mechanisms.
Four minutes before the fatal landing, the captain issued a mayday call, and images captured by bystanders show a bird flying into the plane’s right engine.
The South Korean transport ministry said in a statement that after the mayday call the control tower gave the captain authorization to land on the runway in the opposite direction.
It added that six investigators and nine advisers from the Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board are already at the accident site studying the causes of the crash.
The plane’s two black boxes, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, have been found, according to the ministry.
A total 2,800 members of the fire service, police, armed forces and coast guard have been deployed so far.
The country’s interim president, Choi Sang-mok, ordered related government agencies to make all-out efforts for rescue operations and called an emergency meeting.
All domestic and international flights to and from Muan International Airport were canceled after the incident.
The worst air accident to date in South Korea had been that of an Air China Boeing 767-200, which in April 2002 crashed into a mountain while approaching Gimhae International Airport in the southeastern city of Busan, leaving 129 dead and 37 survivors. EFE
asb/pd
