South Korean Plane Crash Kills 179, Leaves Two Survivors
Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air skidded across runway and smashed into barrier after flight from Bangkok
SEOUL—A passenger plane skidded off the runway, collided with a concrete barrier and burst into flames in South Korea on Sunday, killing nearly all of the 181 people on board and leaving a trail of mystery over one of the deadliest aviation disasters in years.
Investigators were still trying to pinpoint the cause of the fiery crash of an aircraft operated by South Korea’s Jeju Air that occurred just after 9 a.m. local time. The plane was a Boeing 737-800, a narrow-body jet and a workhorse of commercial air travel. It had been attempting to land at an airport in Muan County, in the country’s southwest, local officials said.
Once the blaze was extinguished, all that remained relatively intact was the tail of the aircraft—with a single charred wing angled to the sky. Officials later detailed a six-minute window of mayhem in the final moments of the flight, which had departed from Bangkok with 175 passengers and six crew members aboard. Two were Thai nationals, with the others South Korean citizens.
Some 179 of them died, South Korean officials said, with just two survivors: a pair of flight attendants. One recalled buckling into a seat at the rear of the plane and touching ground before losing consciousness, according to South Korea’s semiofficial Yonhap News Agency, citing local hospital officials.
“What happened?” the flight attendant asked a doctor, Yonhap reported. The attendant sustained a fractured left shoulder and head injuries but is conscious and able to walk. The other flight attendant has been transferred to a hospital, though other details weren’t immediately available.
The Jeju Air flight ranks among the deadliest aviation incidents in recent years. In March 2022, a China Eastern Airlines plane slammed into a mountainside and killed all 132 people aboard, with flight data indicating the crash was caused intentionally, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some 176 people died on a Ukraine International Airlines flight in January 2020, with Iranian officials later admitting the plane had been shot down unintentionally by its armed forces outside Tehran. Boeing’s 737 MAX jets were grounded worldwide in 2019 for nearly two years, after a pair of crashes together took 346 lives.
The South Korean crash caps a tumultuous year for an airline industry that has recovered from the doldrums of the pandemic, though carriers have been left scrambling to replenish staffing and manufacturers struggling to match the bounceback in demand.
The year began with a fiery two-plane collision in Japan on Jan. 2, leaving several Coast Guard members dead. Days later, a 4-foot-long panel blew off an Alaska Airlines plane in midair. Turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight in May left more than 100 people injured. More than 60 people died after a turboprop plane in Brazil plummeted to the ground. And a passenger jet headed for Russia crashed in Kazakhstan last week, drawing an apology from President Vladimir Putin over the “tragic incident.”
In a roughly two-minute briefing with reporters on Sunday, Kim E-bae, the CEO of Jeju Air, apologized to victims and their family members, promising the company would do its best to support them. He said the plane had no history of accidents and that no abnormalities were detected during maintenance inspections before takeoff.
Boeing said it was in contact with and stands ready to support Jeju Air. “We extend our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones, and our thoughts remain with the passengers and crew,” Boeing said.
The airliner tragedy comes during a period of political upheaval in South Korea. Earlier this month, President Yoon Suk Yeol made a short-lived declaration of martial law—a controversial move that led to the country’s legislature impeaching him more than two weeks ago. Then, on Friday, Yoon’s replacement as acting president, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, was also impeached, after declining to make certain judicial appointments.
That thrust Choi Sang-mok, No. 3 in line and a deputy prime minister, into the nation’s top job. The Muan crash occurred within 48 hours of Choi becoming acting president. Visiting the crash site, he declared the region a special disaster zone, allowing the disbursement of state support funds. More than 1,500 emergency personnel have been dispatched.
“I believe no words of consolation will be enough for the families who have suffered such a tragedy,” Choi said.
Mayday call
The Jeju Air plane had descended without the apparent deployment of its landing gear or flaps, which are movable surfaces on the wings that would allow the jet to slow during a typical landing, according to footage aired on South Korean TV networks.
South Korean officials detailed six minutes of chaos before the fatal crash. At 8:57 a.m., the control tower at Muan International Airport warned of a bird strike to the plane, according to the country’s transport ministry. Two minutes later a pilot declared mayday. With control-tower permission, the Jeju Air plane sought to land on a different runway than designated. And at 9:03 a.m. it crashed.
Any issues posed by a bird strike should have been manageable, as engine damage would likely have been limited and wouldn’t preclude the lowering of landing gear, former pilots and aviation-safety experts said.
The head Jeju Air pilot had more than 6,800 hours of flight experience and had held his current role since March 2019; the co-pilot had roughly 1,650 hours in the cockpit, according to South Korea’s transport ministry. The black boxes have been recovered from the plane, though investigators are still trying to retrieve the voice-recording devices.
The Boeing 737-800—a predecessor of the 737 MAX—is one of the safest airplanes ever built, and an inability to lower the landing gear would be rare and have backstops, such as procedures or checklists to follow if there had been a deployment failure, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former senior accident investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration. Guzzetti, who is now an aviation-safety consultant, said he was puzzled by the crash.
Among the safeguards on the 737-800 is a system that would allow the pilots to let gravity lower the landing gear if other systems failed, said Guzzetti, who isn’t involved in the accident investigation. He said he wondered whether the crew mistakenly tried to land without the plane’s landing gear down, realized the mistake and attempted a “go-around” to redo the landing. That could explain why the plane was traveling so fast and so far down the runway, he said.
“If there was a failure there, why not continue to fly, burn off fuel so you don’t have a lot of fuel on board?” Guzzetti said. “You call emergency rescue crews to be ready for you. I don’t see any of that there.”
The Muan International Airport is also surrounded by various bodies of water, meaning the pilots could have opted for a safer sea landing, said Hiroshi Sugie, a former Japan Airlines pilot who has written books about aviation safety.
The pilots appear to have landed in the most dangerous way, Sugie said. “There are just too many errors here,” he said. “A belly landing isn’t something you rush into doing.”
‘Should I write a will?’
Jeju Air, named after a popular South Korean resort island, is a budget carrier that was founded in 2005. It operates roughly 40 aircraft to more than 40 destinations, and handled more than 12 million passengers in 2023, according to the company’s website.
Shares of Jeju Air have fallen about 30% this year, in the midst of growing competition between budget carriers to lower their fares. A weakened South Korean currency, the won, has caused costs to increase because fuel is generally purchased with U.S. dollars.
The Muan International Airport opened in 2007, though it had been largely serving domestic routes. But in recent weeks, it began boosting the number of daily international flights to various countries. The route to Bangkok started running regularly just this month.
Dozens of bodies were moved Sunday to a temporary morgue, where they awaited family members for identification, local authorities said. A makeshift funeral hall would be installed at a nearby sports complex by midday Monday.
At the airport, dozens of family members crowded into a conference room and the terminal’s waiting areas where they got a briefing from the local fire department and waited for further updates. Some dropped to the floor in tears.
At least one passenger had been texting with a family member in the minutes before the crash, according to local media, which took a photo of a phone that showed the exchange.
“Should I write a will?” one of the messages reads.