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A South Korean passenger plane crashed Sunday and burst into flames upon landing, killing at least 80 people, local authorities said, in one of the worst air disasters in the country’s history.
The Jeju Air flight was returning from Bangkok with 181 people on board when its landing gear failed to deploy at Muan International Airport in the south of the country.
According to the Ministry of Transport, 173 of the 175 passengers were Korean and the remaining two were Thai. A further six crew members were on board.
Local television news footage showed the plane skidding down the runway, hitting a wall and bursting into flames. The country’s emergency secretariat said it appeared the plane’s landing gear had malfunctioned.
The fire was extinguished and two people were rescued from the wreckage, the state-run Yonhap News Agency said. More than 30 trucks and several helicopters were called to the disaster.
South Korea’s acting president, Choi Sang-mok, visited the scene on Sunday and ordered an all-out rescue effort, calling on emergency workers to “mobilize all resources and do our best in the rescue operation.”
An airline spokesperson said authorities are still working to determine the exact cause of the crash.
Television footage showed thick smoke billowing from the wreckage of the twin-engine Boeing 737-800 airliner after the crash.
Fire officials told Yonhap News that most of the passengers were feared dead. In a teleconference, officials cited the plane hitting the bird and bad weather as possible causes of the accident.
The tragedy is the second fatal accident in recent days. An Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane made an emergency landing in Kazakhstan on Wednesday after changing course over the Caspian Sea from Grozny in Russia’s southern Chechen Republic.
U.S. and Ukrainian authorities blamed Russian anti-aircraft fire for the accident, which killed 38 of the 67 people on board. Russian authorities blamed the diversion from Grozny on dense fog and flocks of birds, but also said it occurred as Ukrainian military combat drones were attacking nearby cities.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologized to Azerbaijan for the “tragic incident” but did not comment on the alleged Russian interference.
