Plane crashes in South Korea, killing at least 85

A passenger plane carrying 181 people crashed while landing at an airport in southwestern South Korea on Sunday, killing at least 85 people and kicking off a dwindling search for survivors, officials said.

The plane, operated by South Korea’s Jeju Air, was landing at Muan International Airport when the crash took place, local fire department officials said. Footage of the accident shows a white-and-orange plane speeding down a runway on its belly until it overshoots the runway, hitting a barrier and exploding into an orange fireball.

The cause was not immediately clear. The domestic news media reported that a bird strike appears to have made the plane’s landing gear malfunction, forcing it to crash-land.

Eighty-five people had been found dead as of early Sunday afternoon, according to the National Fire Agency. At least two crew members had been rescued from the tail section of the aircraft, and rescuers were searching for more survivors. But Lee Jeong-hyeon, an official in charge of search and rescue operations at the scene, said the plane had broken into so many pieces that only its tail was identifiable.

“We could not recognize the rest of the fuselage,” he said.

The plane, operating as Jeju Air flight 7C2216 and flying from Bangkok to Muan, was carrying 175 passengers and six crew members when the accident happened, around 9 a.m. The plane was listed as a Boeing 737-800 by FlightRadar24, a provider of flight data.

Photos from the South Korean news agency Yonhap showed a tail section of the plane separated and engulfed in orange flames with black smoke billowing up. The plane appears to have hit a concrete wall, according to the photos.

The crash was the worst aviation accident involving a South Korean airline since a Korean Air jet slammed into a hill in Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific, in 1997. That crash killed 229 of the 254 people on board.

The crash on Sunday appears to have been the first fatal one for Jeju Air, a low-cost South Korean carrier that was established in 2005 and flies to dozens of countries in Asia. Jeju Air apologized for the crash in a brief statement.

Thailand’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that there were two Thai passengers on the plane. It said it was trying to verify their conditions.

South Korea has been dealing with a political crisis following an ill-fated bid early this month by President Yoon Suk Yeol to declare martial law for the first time in decades. Lawmakers voted Dec. 14 to impeach Yoon. Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok, the acting president, on Sunday instructed his government to mobilize all equipment and personnel available to rescue as many people as possible, his office said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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