A passenger plane burst into flames Sunday morning after it skid off a runway at a South Korean airport and slammed into a concrete fence when its front landing gear apparently failed to deploy, killing at least 85 people, officials said, in one of the country’s worst aviation disasters.  

The National Fire Agency said rescuers raced to pull people from the Jeju Air passenger plane carrying 181 people at the airport in the town of Muan, about 180 miles south of Seoul. The Transport Ministry identified the plane as a 15-year-old Boeing 737-800 jet and said the crash happened at 9:03 a.m. local time. The plane was returning from Bangkok. 

At least 85 people — 46 women and 39 men — died in the fire, the agency said. Emergency workers pulled out two people, both crew members, and local health officials said they remain conscious. It said it deployed 32 fire trucks and several helicopters to contain the fire.

South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that there were believed to be 173 South Korean passengers aboard the flight and two Thai nationals. There were also six crew members aboard the flight, Reuters reported. 

Lee Jeong-hyeon, chief of the Muan fire station, told a televised briefing that rescue workers are continuing to search for bodies scattered by the crash impact. The plane was completely destroyed, with only the tail assembly remaining recognizable among the wreckage, he said.  

Footage of the crash aired by YTN television showed the Jeju Air plane skidding across the airstrip, apparently with its landing gear still closed, and colliding head-on with a concrete wall on the outskirts of the facility. Local TV stations aired footage showing thick pillows of black smoke billowing from the plane engulfed with flame.

Workers were looking into various possibilities about what caused the crash, including whether the aircraft was struck by birds that caused mechanical problems, Lee said. Senior Transport Ministry official Joo Jong-wan separately told reporters that government investigators arrived at the site to investigate the cause of the crash and fire.

Thailand’s prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, expressed deep condolences to the families of those affected by the accident through a social media post. Paetongtarn said she had ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to provide assistance immediately.    

Acting South Korean President Choi Sang-mok ordered an all-out rescue response, Reuters reported. Choi only became acting president Friday, replacing the previous acting president, Han Duck-soo, following Han’s impeachment. It all comes in the wake of the government crisis caused by the Dec. 3 martial law declaration from former President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was later impeached as well. 

This is one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea’s aviation history. The last time South Korea suffered a large-scale air disaster was in 1997, when an Korean Airline plane crashed in Guam, killing 228 people on board.  

This comes after 38 people were killed and 29 more injured when an Azerbaijan Airlines plane bound from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to the Russian city of Grozny crashed in Aktau, Kazakhstan on Christmas Day. On Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an apology for the crash, and the Kremlin said in a statement that air defense systems were firing near Grozny airport as the airliner “repeatedly” attempted to land there. It did not, though, explicitly say one of these hit the plane.

A U.S. official told CBS News there were early indications a Russian anti-aircraft system may have struck the plane in a region where Ukrainian and Russian forces have traded drone and rocket fire for months.  

In:
• Plane Crash
• South Korea