The crash occurred as the Jeju Air flight from Bangkok, Thailand, landed at Muan International Airport in South Korea.
At least 47 people have been reported killed when a passenger plane veered off the runway and crashed at an airport in the South Korean city of Muan, according to reports.
The accident occurred on Sunday morning as the Jeju Air flight 7C2216, carrying 175 passengers and six crew from the Thai capital Bangkok, was landing at Muan International Airport in the south of the country, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports.
Citing firefighting authorities, the Yonhap news agency said that 47 people had been killed in the crash. The news agency also reported that two people have been found alive.
Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride, reporting from South Korea’s capital Seoul, said a major rescue operation was under way at the airport in the southwest of the country.
“This was a flight returning overnight from Bangkok. There seems to have been some kind of malfunction with the landing gear and images which have been on the media here do appear to show the plane landing on its belly, skidding along the runway, followed then by a huge explosion,” McBride said.
“Eyewitness accounts have talked then about a series of explosions and certainly images that we have been seeing have shown a catastrophic fire,” he said.
One photo shared by local media showed thick clouds of black smoke coming out of the plane. Another showed the tail section of the jet engulfed in flames on what appeared to be the side of the runway, with firefighters and emergency vehicles nearby.
South Korea’s Acting President Choi Sang-mok, meanwhile, ordered “all-out efforts for rescue operations” at Muan airport.
“All related agencies… must mobilise all available resources to save the personnel,” he told officials in a statement.
The crash is believed to have been caused by “contact with birds, resulting in malfunctioning landing gear” as the plane attempted to land at the airport in the country’s southwest, Yonhap also reported.
