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4 days ago
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South Korea’s acting president has ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operations, while authorities plan a separate check of all Boeing 737-800s, after 179 people died in a Jeju Air crash involving the aircraft on Sunday.
As shocked citizens began a second day of official mourning and flags flew at half-mast, the government said it would carry out the audit of all 101 of the aircraft in domestic operation, with US investigators, possibly including Boeing, joining the probe.
Choi Sang-mok, who was appointed president two days before the disaster, said an exhaustive inspection was essential to overhaul the aviation safety system and “move toward a safer Republic of Korea”.
He was speaking as reports emerged that a passenger jet belonging to Jeju Air was forced to return to Gimpo airport in Seoul soon after taking off on Monday, following an unspecified problem with its landing gear.
Landing gear malfunction is among the issues being targeted by the investigation into Sunday’s crash, which occurred after the plane skidded along the runway in what the aviation industry describes as a “belly landing”.
Officials have confirmed that 179 of the 181 passengers and crew died when the Jeju Air plane crashed into a wall at Muan international airport shortly after attempting to land without its landing gear deployed. It is the country’s worst domestic civil aviation disaster.
Two flight attendants – a man and a woman – were rescued from the tail of the aircraft, which burst into flames and broke apart upon impact with the wall. They were being treated at a hospital in Seoul after being transferred from hospitals near the airport, the Yonhap news agency said.
The male survivor was being treated for fractures to his ribs, shoulder blade and upper spine, said Ju Woong, director of the Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital. Ju said the man, whose name has not been released, told doctors he “woke up to find (himself) rescued.” Details on the female survivor were not immediately available.
Officials said the crash could have been caused by a bird strike and weather conditions – or a combination of those and other factors – but the exact cause was not yet known.
The plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder have been retrieved from the wreckage, but media reports said it could take longer than usual to determine the cause as the flight data recorder had been damaged in the crash.
Establishing the cause of a major air disaster typically takes months, and damage to the recorder was expected to cause further delays, Yonhap said, citing a land ministry official.
Choi declared a seven-day mourning period starting Sunday, as he attempted to coordinate a response to a major disaster just days after he replaced his impeached predecessor, Han Duck-soo.
Han, too, had been made interim leader after the impeachment in mid-December of Yoon Suk Yeol over his disastrous, and short-lived, declaration of martial law earlier in the month.
The animosity of the past month appeared to have been put to one side as senior politicians from the ruling and opposition parties attempted to console a country in mourning.
While the accident investigation will focus on the model of aircraft, there will inevitably be questions for the flight’s operator Jeju Air.
The low-cost carrier said it would do all it could to support the families of the victims, including with financial aid. Its chief executive, Kim E-bae, told a televised news conference he took “full responsibility” for the crash, irrespective of the cause, and bowed deeply in apology with other senior company officials. He said the company had not identified any mechanical problems with the aircraft following regular checkups and that he would wait for the results of government investigations.
Kim, though, was met with an angry response when he arrived at Muan and attempted to speak to grieving relatives in person.
Investigators said 141 of the 179 victims had been identified using DNA analysis or fingerprint collection, according to a statement from the land ministry.
Victims’ families camped out at the airport overnight in special tents set up in the airport lounge after a long day waiting for news about their loved ones. “I had a son on board that plane,” said an elderly man waiting in the airport lounge, who asked not to be named, adding that his son’s body was among those that had not yet been identified.
The control tower at Muan, 300 km south-west of Seoul, issued a bird strike warning to the plane shortly before it intended to land and gave its pilot permission to land in a different area. The pilot sent out a distress signal shortly before the plane went past the runway and skidded across a buffer zone before hitting the wall.
The crash was the worst on South Korean soil and one of the deadliest in its aviation history. The last time South Korea suffered a large-scale air disaster was in 1997, when a Korean Air jet crashed in Guam, killing 228 people onboard. In 2013, an Asiana Airlines plane crash-landed in San Francisco, killing three people and injuring 200.
Most of the 175 passengers were South Korean nationals, along with two women from Thailand. Of the total, 82 were men and 93 were women, ranging in age from three to 78 years old. Many were in their 40s to 60s and were returning from winter holidays in Thailand when the accident occurred.
Boonchuay Duangmanee, the father of one of the Thai passengers, told the Associated Press that his daughter, Jongluk, had been working in a factory in South Korea for several years and returned to Thailand to visit her family. “I never thought that this would be the last time we would see each other forever,” he said.
