Over 170 presumed dead in South Korean plane crash

A passenger plane carrying 181 people crashed while landing at an airport in southwestern South Korea on Sunday. Officials said most of the people on board were presumed dead, even as two survivors were found and search efforts continued.

The plane, operated by South Korea’s Jeju Air, was landing at Muan International Airport when the crash took place, local fire department officials said. Footage of the accident shows a white-and-orange plane speeding down a runway on its belly until it overshoots the runway, hitting a barrier and exploding into an orange fireball.

The cause was not immediately clear. Officials were investigating what caused the plane to crash land, including the possibility of a bird strike leading to a landing gear malfunction, said Ju Jong-wan, a director of aviation policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

Ninety-six people had been found dead as of early Sunday afternoon, according to the National Fire Agency. At least two crew members had been rescued from the tail section of the aircraft, and rescuers continued searching through the wreckage. Lee Jeong-hyeon, an official in charge of search and rescue operations at the scene, said the plane had broken into so many pieces that only its tail was identifiable.

“We could not recognize the rest of the fuselage,” he said.

Here’s what else to know about the crash:

The plane, operating as Jeju Air flight 7C2216 and flying from Bangkok to Muan, was carrying 175 passengers and six crew members when the accident happened around 9 a.m. The plane was listed as a Boeing 737-800 by FlightRadar24, a provider of flight data.

Photos from the South Korean news agency Yonhap showed a tail section of the plane separated and engulfed in orange flames with black smoke billowing up. The plane appears to have hit a concrete wall, according to the photos.

The crash was the worst aviation accident involving a South Korean airline since a Korean Air jet slammed into a hill in Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific, in 1997. That crash killed 229 of the 254 people on board.

The crash on Sunday appears to have been the first fatal one for Jeju Air, a low-cost South Korean carrier that was established in 2005 and flies to dozens of countries in Asia. Jeju Air apologized for the crash in a brief statement.

Thailand’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that there were two Thai passengers on the plane. It said it was trying to verify their conditions.

South Korea has been dealing with a political crisis following an ill-fated bid early this month by President Yoon Suk Yeol to declare martial law for the first time in decades. Lawmakers voted on Dec. 14 to impeach Mr. Yoon. Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok, the acting president, on Sunday instructed his government to mobilize all equipment and personnel available to rescue as many people as possible, his office said.