There were 181 people on board, six crew members (pilot, co-pilot and four assistants) and 175 passengers, of which 173 were South Koreans, most of them returning from family holidays, and two Thais.
South Korean authorities announced this Tuesday that they had identified 174 of the 179 victims of the plane crash that occurred at Muan International Airport last Sunday, and that the vast majority have already been transferred to a temporary morgue.
“Of the 32 people who could not be identified by fingerprints, we identified 17 people in the first DNA test and 10 more in the second,” authorities said at a press conference.
The identities of the remaining five people are being confirmed due to “inconsistencies in DNA”, the same source added.
The bodies of four of the identified victims were handed over to their respective families and preparations for the funerals have already begun in their cities of origin, according to South Korean authorities.
The estimate published in the initial report indicated that the examinations to identify the remains of all the victims and their delivery to their families would be completed within 10 days, as the majority were seriously charred.
On Sunday, flight 7C2216 of the South Korean airline Jeju Air exploded after landing on its belly, without gear, and skidding on the runway at Muan airport, in the southwest of the country, until hitting a concrete wall, then exploding and killing 179 people on board, leaving only two survivors.
This was the worst civil aviation incident ever on South Korean soil.
The acting South Korean President, Choi Sang-mok, this Tuesday instructed the Government to introduce the necessary improvements in the airline operations system, following an emergency safety inspection of six local airlines and to all models of the plane involved in the accident, a Boeing 737-800, made by the authorities the day before.
“The Ministry of Transport must thoroughly re-examine the overall aircraft operating system, starting with this inspection, and immediately implement any necessary improvements,” Choi said at a disaster control meeting in Seoul.
The accident occurred around 9:03 am (00:07 am in Lisbon) on Sunday, when the plane, a Boeing 737-800 that had departed hours earlier from Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok, Thailand, landed in Muan (290 kilometers southwest of Seoul) without the landing gear opened, eventually hitting a wall, causing the aircraft to explode.
There were 181 people on board, six crew members (pilot, co-pilot and four assistants) and 175 passengers, of which 173 were South Koreans, most of them returning from family holidays, and two Thais.
Authorities investigating the incident so far believe that the cause of the accident may have been the failure to open the landing gear and other braking mechanisms.
The two black boxes were found hours after the accident, but the flight data recorder (FDR) could take between one and six months to be decoded, according to the South Korean Ministry of Transport, because it was damaged.
