South Korean authorities announced this Monday that they have identified 140 of the 179 victims who lost their lives in the plane crash at Muan International Airport. A large majority of them have already been moved to a temporary morgue.
“Once we are ready to transfer the bodies after the autopsies carried out by the investigation agencies, we will contact the families,” said a South Korean official, according to the South Korean agency Yonhap. The victims’ belongings are being collected from the runway and the area will be kept intact while authorities investigate the exact cause of the accident.
On Sunday, South Korean Jeju Air flight 7C2216 exploded after landing and skidding off the runway at Muan airport. 179 people died and only two survivors could be rescued, which represents the worst civil aviation accident ever to occur on South Korean soil.
The accident occurred around 9:03 local time, when the plane, a Boeing 737-800 that departed hours before from Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok (Thailand), landed in Muan without having the landing gear deployed. After sliding down the landing strip, it ended up hitting a wall, which caused the device to explode.
There were 181 people on board, six of the crew – pilot, co-pilot and four assistants – and 175 passengers, of whom 173 were South Koreans, mostly people returning from family vacations, and two of Thai nationality.
At the moment the authorities, who are already investigating the accident, believe that the cause of the accident could be the failure to deploy the landing gear and other braking mechanisms, possibly due to a collision with a bird.
The two black boxes were found hours after the accident, although the South Korean Ministry of Transportation has reported that the flight data recorder (FDR) has been damaged, and that therefore it could take between one and six months to decode it.
The Government will inspect the airline
The South Korean government has announced that it will carry out rigorous safety inspections on Jeju Air – a low-cost airline – after the accident, related to a malfunction of the landing gear. This morning, another company plane reported the same problem and had to return to its departure airport, this time without victims.
“We plan to implement rigorous aviation safety inspections in response to landing gear incidents,” Joo Jong-wan, head of aviation policy at the Ministry of Transportation, said during a briefing.
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