South Korea Plane Crash: Latest Updates and Key Details

On Sunday morning, a passenger plane failed to deploy its front landing gear, skidded off the runway, and collided with a concrete barrier at a South Korean airport, causing it to catch fire. Officials say the tragedy was one of the biggest aviation disasters in the nation's history, with at least 85 people killed. 

85 people died due to plane crash in South Korea

Rescue crews raced to Muan Airport, some 180 miles south of Seoul, to remove passengers from the Jeju Air aircraft carrying 181 people, according to the National Fire Agency. The disaster happened at 9:03 AM local time, and the Ministry of Transport said the aircraft was a 15-year-old Boeing 737-800. The aircraft was on its way back from Bangkok.

According to the agency, the fire claimed the lives of at least 85 people, including 39 males and 46 women. According to South Korean news agency Yonhap, the aircraft had two Thai nationals and 173 South Koreans. Six crew members were also on board, according to Reuters.

In a televised briefing, Lee Jeong-hyun, the head of the Muan Fire Station, disclosed that rescue personnel were still looking for bodies that had been dispersed by the crash's impact. 

Only the tail assembly was discernible among the wreckage, he said, describing the aircraft as totally destroyed. According to footage shown by YTN Television, the Jeju Air aircraft crashed into a concrete wall at the outer edge of the airport after skidding down the runway, seemingly with its landing gear still deployed. Images of dense black smoke rising from the burning airplane were shown by local television stations.

According to Lee, authorities were looking into a number of possible causes for the disaster, such as the possibility that the aircraft's collision with birds caused a technical failure. Separately, senior Transport Ministry official Joo Jong-wan said that government investigators had reached the scene to look into what caused the collision and the fire that followed. In a social media message, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra of Thailand sent his sincere sympathies to the families impacted by the tragedy. According to Paetongtarn, she had directed the Foreign Ministry to offer relief right away.

Choi Sang-mok, the acting president of South Korea, reportedly gave the order to launch a full-scale rescue operation, according to Reuters. In the midst of a governmental crisis brought on by former President Yoon Suk-yeol's imposition of martial law on December 3, Choi took over as acting president on Friday, succeeding Han Duck-soo, who had also held the position until his impeachment. Later on, Yoon was impeached. This incident is one of the deadliest aircraft mishaps in South Korea. on 1997, a Korean Air flight crashed on Guam, killing 228 people, the nation's most recent significant aviation disaster.

In a separate incident, an Azerbaijan Airlines aircraft carrying passengers from Baku to Grozny, Russia, crashed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, on Christmas Day, killing 38 people and wounding 29 more. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, expressed regret over the incident on Saturday.

Although it did not specifically confirm whether the air defense systems hit the airliner, the Kremlin said that they were in operation close to Grozny Airport during the plane's repeated landing attempts. Early indications indicated the plane might have been struck by a Russian anti-aircraft system in an area where Russian and Ukrainian forces have been exchanging rocket and drone fire for months, a U.S. official told the media.