Distraught families demand answers after 179 are killed in South Korea plane crash

Grieving families screamed and wept at a South Korean airport as the names of the dead were confirmed after a plane carrying 181 people crashed, killing all but two on board, in the worst domestic aviation disaster in the country’s history.

- SIMON CALDER, ARPAN RAI and ALEX ROSS

The Jeju Air passenger plane skidded off a runway at Muan international airport, slammed into a concrete fence and burst into flames after the Boeing 737-800 from Bangkok attempted an emergency landing yesterday at 9.03am local time.

Officials said two members of the cabin crew were rescued alive, but all 175 passengers, both pilots and the two other crew members were killed in the fire that swept through the wreckage.

An investigation has been launched, with a bird strike collision among the contributory factors being considered for the crash. Preliminary reports also suggest the plane’s front landing gear failed to deploy. South Korean president Choi Sang-mok has declared a seven-day period of national mourning.

Inside the arrival area of the airport, around 185 miles away from the capital Seoul, authorities called out the names of some of those killed in the crash, triggering an explosion of grief and rage among the passengers’ families in the terminal where their loved ones had been due to return home.

Among the dead were three generations of the same family, with a man in his sixties telling Korean Yonhap news agency that his sister-in-law, daughter, her husband and their young children were tragically all on board. The youngest passenger was a threeyear-old boy, the oldest was 78, while five of the dead were children under the age of 10, authorities said.

Maeng Gi-su, 78, told the BBC his nephew and his nephew’s two sons were on the plane on the family’s first trip abroad. He said: “I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared. My heart aches so much.”