By Ju-min Park and Dogyun Kim
EMUAN COUNTY, South Korea (Reuters) – Jeon Je-young continues to play video of the plane with his daughter and 180 other people who climbed a wall and burst into flames at a South Korean airport.
His daughter Mi-sook died on the ship. He still doesn't believe it.
71-year-old Jeon says: “When I saw the video of the crash, the plane seemed out of control. “The pilots probably had no choice but to do it. My daughter, in her mid-40s, ended up like this. It's unbelievable.”
Mi-sook was a warm-hearted child, he said. He brought food and a calendar for the next year to her house on Dec 21, which was her last moment with him.
“She's much nicer than my son, sometimes she asks me to eat,” recalls Jeon, showing her last exchange with her daughter on her cell phone.
South Korea's worst-ever crash killed 179 people on Sunday, when a plane landed on its belly and skidded off the end of the runway, sparking a fire at Muan Airport.
Jeju Air flight 7C2216, arriving from the Thai capital Bangkok with 175 passengers and six crew on board, was seen skidding down the runway with no visible landing gear before crashing into the landing gear and a wall in an explosion of flames and debris.
Only two people – both workers – survived and were being treated for injuries.
SORROW AND DEPARTURE
The authorities named some of those who died in the accident, which caused an outburst of grief and anger from the families of the passengers who had gathered at the landing area of the airport.
They screamed, cried and fell to the ground in the terminal where their loved ones were about to return home.
Crime scene investigators collected saliva swabs from the families to conduct DNA testing to identify the victims.
Jeon's daughter was on her way home after going with friends to Bangkok for Christmas vacation. She leaves behind a devastated family, including a husband and teenage daughter.
“The water near the airport is shallow. Here the fields are softer than this cement runway. Why couldn't the pilot land there instead?” Jeon said.
Fire officials said the impact of the crash left the plane “almost completely destroyed”.
“With the double collision and the explosion, most of the passengers were thrown from the plane, although two crew members luckily survived at the tail end,” said Yeom Dong-bu, a firefighter from Muan who was dispatched to the scene.
“I used to work in ambulances so I saw this kind of bad things like car accidents, but not at this level,” he added.
Mi-sook is identified through her fingerprints, and her family is looking for a funeral home near her hometown of Gwangju to take her body there.
“He was almost home, so (he saw) no need to call the family (to leave any last message). He thought he was coming home,” said Jeon.