Written by Joo Min Park and Doojeon Kim
MUAN COUNTY, South Korea (Reuters) – Jeon Ji-young continues to play a video of the plane with his daughter and 180 other people on board crashing into a wall and bursting into flames at a South Korean airport.
His daughter Mi Sook died on the plane. He still can't believe it.
“When I watched the video of the accident, the plane seemed out of control,” 71-year-old Jeon said. “The pilots probably had no choice but to do this. My daughter, who is in her mid-40s, ended up like this. This is unbelievable.”
He said Mi Sook was a kind-hearted child. She brought some food and a calendar for the coming year to his house on December 21, which became his last brief moment with her.
“She is much nicer than my son, and sometimes she asks me out for a meal,” Jeon recalls, showing his latest conversations with his daughter on his mobile phone.
The deadliest air accident ever in South Korea killed 179 people on Sunday, when a plane landed on its belly, skidded off the end of the runway, and exploded in a fireball at Muan International Airport.
Jeju Air flight No. 7C2216, coming from the Thai capital, Bangkok, with 175 passengers and six crew members on board, was seen sliding down the runway with no visible landing gear before colliding with navigation equipment and a wall amid an explosion of flames and debris.
Only two crew members survived and are receiving treatment for injuries.
Sadness and anger
The authorities appealed for the names of some of those killed in the accident, which led to an explosion of grief and anger among the families of passengers gathered in the airport’s arrivals area.
They screamed, cried and collapsed on the floor of the hall where their loved ones were scheduled to return home.
Crime scene investigators collected saliva samples from families to conduct DNA tests to identify the victims.
Jeon's daughter was on her way home after traveling with her friends to Bangkok for the Christmas holiday. She left behind a devastated family, including a husband and a teenage daughter.
“The water near the airport is not deep. Here the fields are softer than this cement runway. Why couldn't the pilot land there instead?” Jeon said.
Fire officials reported that the impact of the accident resulted in the plane being almost completely destroyed.
“Through the two collisions and the explosion, most of the passengers were thrown from the plane, although two crew members fortunately survived in the end,” said Yeom Dong-po, one of the Mu'an firefighters who was dispatched to the scene.
He added: “I used to work in ambulances, so I saw these kind of terrible things like car accidents, but not on this scale.”
Mi Sook was identified through her fingerprints, and her family is looking for a funeral home near her hometown of Gwangju to transport her body there.
“She was about to go home, so she (didn't see) the need to call the family (to leave any final message). She thought she was going home,” Jeon said.
