A passenger plane skidded off a runway at a South Korean airport yesterday, 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.
Choi, who traveled to the site in Muan, called for officials to employ all available resources to find the missing and identify the victims as soon as possible. The government declared Muan a special disaster zone to provide assistance to the families of victims and designated a weeklong national mourning period through Saturday.
The Muan crash is one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea’s aviation history. The last time South Korea suffered a large-scale air disaster was in 1997, when a Korean Airline plane crashed in Guam, killing 228 people on board. HYUNG-JIN KIM & KIM TONG-HYUNG, SEOUL, MDT/AP
