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An Air Busan plane with 176 people on board became engulfed in fire just before takeoff in South Korea. All pf the passengers and crew were evacuated safely, authorities reported.
The fire on the Air Busan Airbus A321 reportedly began in the tail section of the plane as it sat on the runway. The plane was preparing to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in Busan, South Korea at the time of the incident.
169 passengers, six crewmembers and one engineer were evacuated using an escape slide, South Korea’s Transport Ministry reported. Three people suffered minor injuries during the evacuation, according to South Korea’s National Fire Agency.
Wild video shows firefighters trying to put out the massive blaze as part of the containment operation after arriving at the scene just eight minutes after it began. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
This incident comes just four weeks after a Boeing Jeju Air passenger jet crashed and exploded at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea. That incident resulted in the deaths of 179 of the 181 people that were on board the plane.
In that case, the plane ran off the end of the airport’s runaway, sliding on its underbelly, and slamming nose-first into a concrete barrier. The plane’s landing gear failed to deploy, resulting in the deadliest plane crash in the history of South Korea.
The Associated Press reported after the crash that the chief of the Muan fire station, Lee Jeong-hyeon, said that the plane was completely destroyed, with only the tail assembly still recognizable in the wreckage.
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Strangely, video footage showed the pilots did not deploy flaps or slats to slow the aircraft, leading some to speculate that there had been a hydraulic failure. John Cox, a retired airline pilot and CEO of Safety Operating Systems in St. Petersburg, Florida, told the AP that damage and injuries would possibly have been minimized if it weren’t for the large concrete barrier that the plane slammed into being located so close to the end of the runway.