Emergency Safety Inspections Ordered in South Korea Following Jeju Air Crash

 

Authorities plan a separate check of all Boeing 737-800s and South Korea’s acting president has ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operations, after 179 people died in a Jeju Air crash involving the aircraft on Sunday.

Flags flew at half mast as shocked citizens began a second day of official mourning while the government said it will conduct a full audit of all 101 domestic aircraft in service, with help from US investigators, possibly including Boeing.

But two days before the disaster, Choi Sang-mok, who was appointed president, said the aviation safety system needed to be overhauled in an 'exhaustive' inspection so the Republic of Korea could 'move toward a safer Republic of Korea'.

Reports emerged that soon after taking off on Monday, a passenger jet run by Jeju Air was forced to return to Gimpo airport in Seoul following an unspecified problem with its landing gear — which he was speaking about.

Among the issues being investigated after the crash was a landing gear malfunction, after Sunday’s crash in which the plane skidded along the runway in what the aviation industry describes as a 'belly landing'.

It was confirmed by officials that of the 181 passengers and crew on the Jeju Air plane that crashed into a wall at Muan international airport when it came down short and without the landing gear deployed, 179 died. The accident is the country’s worst domestic civil aviation disaster.

A man and a woman were rescued from the tail of the aircraft which burst into flames and broke apart as it hit the wall, two flight attendants. The Yonhap news agency said they had been taken to hospital in Seoul after being transferred from hospitals close to the airport.

They were being treated for fractures of his ribs, shoulder blade and upper spine, according to Ju Woong, director of Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital. The man, whose name has not been released, told doctors he 'woke up and found (himself) being rescued', Ju said. There were no immediate details available about the female survivor.

Though he wouldn't say what the cause was, eventually, officials said it could have been a bird strike or weather conditions – or a combination of the two and other things – but that it wasn't known yet.

A damaged flight data recorder could delay attempts to determine the cause of the accident as it is brought to the surface from the wreckage of the plane, media reports said.

The cause of a major air disaster usually only emerges months later, and damage to the recorder was expected to prolong that process, a land ministry official told Yonhap.

Choi declared a seven day mourning period starting Sunday as he tries to make sense of a major disaster shortly after he replaced an ousted predecessor, Han Duck Soo.

Yoon also was impeached in mid-December over his disastrous, and short lived, declaration of martial law earlier in the month and, like Han, had been made interim leader.

Senior politicians from both ruling and opposition parties came together to try to comfort a country in mourning after the animosity of the past month seemed to have been put to one side.

The accident investigation, however, will look into the model of aircraft, and questions will inevitably be for Jeju Air, the flight’s operator.

The low-cost carrier said it would 'do everything it can to support the families of the victims,' including financially. Kim E-bae, its chief executive, told a televised news conference he took 'full responsibility' — regardless of the cause — and apologized for the crash with his senior company officials, who bowed deeply. The company had not found any mechanical problems with the aircraft during regular checkups, he said, and waited on the results of government investigations.

But Kim was greeted with an angry response when he reached Muan airport to visit grieving relatives in person.

The land ministry said in a statement that investigators have identified 141 of the 179 victims using DNA or fingerprint analysis.

Special tents were put up in the airport lounge for the long day in hot weather in the hope that they would hear news about their loved ones, who had still not been found. An elderly man waiting in the airport lounge who asked not to be named said he had a son on board that plane and his body was the one that the authorities had not identified.

A bird strike warning was issued to the plane by the control tower at Muan, 300 km south-west of Seoul, just before the flight wanted to land and its pilot was allowed to do so in another area. Just before the plane flew past the runway, then slid across a buffer zone and struck the wall, the pilot sent out a distress signal.

It was the worst crash on South Korean soil and one of the deadliest in its aviation history. South Korea last suffered a large scale air disaster in 1997 when a Korean Air jet crashed in Guam killing 228 people on board. Back in 2013, an Asiana Airlines plane crash landed in San Francisco, killing three people and injuring 200. The bulk of the 175 passengers were South Korean and two women of Thailand. From three to 78 years old, of the total 175, 82 were men and 93 were women. Nearly all were in their 40s to 60s and were back from winter holidays in Thailand when the accident happened. The father of one of the Thai passengers, Boonchuay Duangmanee, told the Associated Press that Jongluk had been working in a South Korea factory for more than two years before returning to Thailand to visit her family. He said he didn’t think that this will be his last time seeing her forever.