Ju-min Park and Dogyun Kim
MUAN DISTRICT, South Korea (Reuters) – Jeon Je-young keeps playing a video of the plane with his daughter and 180 others on board crashing into a wall and burning at a South Korean airport.
His daughter Mi-sook died on the ship. He still can’t believe it.
“When I saw the video of the crash, the plane seemed to be out of control,” said 71-year-old Jeon. “The pilots probably had no choice but to do it. My daughter, who is only in her mid-40s, ended up like this. This is unbelievable.”
Mi-sook was a hearty child, he said. She brought some food and a calendar for the next year to his house on December 21st, which was his last brief moment with her.
“She’s much nicer than my son, sometimes she asks me to go out for lunch,” Jeon recalled, showing recent conversations with his daughter on his cell phone.
South Korea’s deadliest-ever air crash killed 179 people on Sunday, when a passenger jet landed on its belly and skidded off the end of the runway, erupting in a fireball at Muan International Airport.
Jeju Air Flight 7C2216, which arrived from the Thai capital of Bangkok with 175 passengers and six crew members, was seen skidding down the runway with no visible landing gear before crashing into navigation equipment and a wall in an explosion of flames and debris.
Only two people – both crew members – survived and are being treated for their injuries.
SADNESS AND ANGER
The authorities called out the names of some of those who died in the crash, which caused an explosion of grief and anger among the families of the passengers gathered in the arrivals area of the airport.
They screamed, cried and fell on the floor of the terminal where their loved ones were supposed to return home.
Crime scene investigators collected saliva from the family to run DNA tests to identify the victims.
Jeon’s daughter was on her way home after traveling with friends to Bangkok for the Christmas holidays. She leaves behind a devastated family, including her husband and teenage daughter.
“The water near the airport is not deep. There are softer fields here than this cement runway. Why couldn’t the pilot land there?” Jeon said.
Fire officials reported that the plane was “almost completely destroyed” by the impact.
“Due to the two collisions and the explosion, most of the passengers were ejected from the plane, although two crew members luckily survived on the tail,” said Yeom Dong-bu, a firefighter from Muan who was dispatched to the scene.
“I used to work on ambulances so I’ve seen these terrible things like crashes, but not on this scale,” he added.
Mi-sook is identified by her fingerprints, and her family searches for a funeral home near her hometown of Gwangju to transport her body there.
“She was almost home, so (she saw) no need to call the family (to leave any last message). She thought she was going home,” Jeon said.
