Iran Press/Asia: A passenger plane burst into flames Sunday after it skidded off a runway at a South Korean airport and slammed into a concrete fence when its front landing gear apparently failed to deploy, killing at least 127 people, officials said, in one of the country's worst aviation disasters.
The National Fire Agency said the fire was almost put out but officials were still trying to pull people from the Jeju Air passenger plane carrying 181 people at the airport in the town of Muan, about 290 kilometers (180 miles) south of Seoul.
The agency reported that among the casualties of the fire were 37 women and 25 men, totaling at least 62 fatalities. Emergency responders rescued one passenger and one crew member. To combat the fire, 32 fire trucks and multiple helicopters were dispatched.
YTN television broadcasted footage of the crash, depicting the Jeju Air plane sliding across the airstrip, seemingly with its landing gear still retracted, before crashing head-on into a concrete wall on the airport's periphery. The transport ministry confirmed that the incident occurred at 9:03 a.m. local time.
Local TV stations aired footage showing thick pillows of black smoke billowing from the plane engulfed with flame.
Emergency officials in Muan are investigating the cause of the fire, suspecting a malfunction in the plane's landing gear. The transport ministry confirmed that the aircraft, returning from Bangkok, had two Thai nationals among its passengers.
It’s one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea’s aviation history. The last time South Korea suffered a large-scale air disaster was in 1997, when a Korean Airline plane crashed in Guam, killing 228 people on board.
