bird strike and weather conditions – or a combination of those and other factors – but the exact cause is not yet known.
Experts say many questions remain, including why the plane appeared to be travelling so fast and why its landing gear did not appear to be down when it skidded down the runway and into a concrete embankment.
South Korea has begun seven days of national mourning, with flags flown at half-mast.
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here.
As evening fell, a man in his 60s kept returning to the family support desk, his son by his side. His wife had been travelling with her sisters-in-law on the flight.
While the sisters-in-law’s bodies had been identified, his wife’s name was still not on the list. Again and again, they checked the registry of names, his son repeatedly collapsing in tears.
The following morning, after spending the night in makeshift tents at the airport lounge, relatives of passengers not yet identified waited for news.
A middle-aged man and woman kept their gaze fixed through the fence, where remnants of the plane – seats, gates and twisted metal parts – were still scattered across the field.
notes in this story. Its chief executive, Kim E-bae, told a televised news conference he took “full responsibility” for the crash, irrespective of the cause, and bowed deeply in apology with other senior company officials. He said the company had not identified any mechanical problems with the aircraft following regular checkups and that he would wait for the results of government investigations.reported by Yonhap news agency, which also said that local travel agencies reported a spike in cancellations of tour packages in the wake of the worst aviation accident on South Korean soil.
“We had about 40 inquiries regarding travel cancellations on Sunday alone,” one travel agent told Yonhap news agency. “We saw about double the usual amount of cancellations and a 50% decrease in bookings.”
from the media report:
The Boeing B737-800, which is believed to have experienced a landing gear malfunction during its descent at Muan International Airport on Sunday, was found to have traveled between Muan, Jeju Island and Incheon, west of Seoul, in the prior 48-hour time window.
It was also found to have traveled to international destinations, including Beijing, Bangkok, Kota Kinabalu, Nagasaki and Taipei.
The aircraft served as a charter flight for group tours mostly organized by a Gwangju-based travel agency, which offered a 5-day package trip to Bangkok for the Christmas season.
Charter flights are specially scheduled based on demand and are typically filled exclusively with passengers recruited by travel agencies.
Industry observers have raised concerns about whether Jeju Air may have overextended itself by scheduling excessive charter flights during the year-end peak season.
voted to impeach the previous acting president, Han Duck-soo.
As we mentioned in a previous post, he has ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operation system “to prevent recurrence of aircraft accidents”.
Source: theguardian.com
