A passenger plane skidded off a runway at a South Korean airport on Sunday, slammed into a concrete fence and burst into flames after its front landing gear apparently failed to deploy. All but two of the 181 people on board died in one of the country’s worst aviation disasters.
The country’s National Fire Agency (NFA) said rescuers raced to pull people from the Jeju Air passenger plane at the airport in the town of Muan, about 290 kilometres south of the capital, Seoul.
Emergency officials later confirmed there were only two survivors. Workers pulled two crew members to safety. Health officials said they are conscious and not in life-threatening condition.
Family members cried as officials announced the names of some victims at a lounge in the Muan airport.
Footage of the crash aired by YTN television showed the plane skidding across the airstrip, apparently with its landing gear still closed, and colliding head-on with a concrete wall on the facility’s outskirts.
Local TV stations aired footage showing the aircraft engulfed in flames, with thick pillows of black smoke billowing from it. The NFA deployed 32 fire trucks and several helicopters to contain the blaze. About 1,560 firefighters, police officers, soldiers and other officials were also sent to the site, the agency said.
Emergency officials in Muan said they were examining the cause of the fire, initially saying the plane’s landing gear appeared to have malfunctioned.
John Cox, president of aviation consulting firm Safety Operating Systems LLC, based in Washington, D.C., said the footage indicates the plane may have taken a bird strike to one or both engines, but investigators will know more once they study the aircraft’s black boxes and scour the engines for bird debris.
U.K. aviation expert Philip Butterworth-Hayes told Agence France-Presse that a strike to both engines would cause the aircraft to lose power, and pilots would have to activate the APU, or auxillary power unit, to get power back and gain more control over things like the landing gear.
“It may have been they did not have time to get the landing gear down by the auxiliary means because of having limited or no power from the engines,” Cox told CBC News.
He said the aircraft initially appeared to be under control on the runway and was slowing down, “and would have come to a stop had that wall not been there.”
Cox said under international standards, airports should have a clear area at the end of the runway so that “if an airplane does go off, it doesn’t strike something.”
Source-BBC
