Two crew members have been rescued alive when rescue team found them at the tail of Jeju Airlines Plane flying from Bangkok that landed at Muan International Airport in South Korea on Sunday without wheels or landing gears, using its belly to land through, veering off the airport runway and burst into fireball when it slammed into the wall of the airport parameters fence, killing over 177 persons onboard as two occupants in the aircraft are yet to be accounted for.

Jeju Airlines in a press statement said that 181 persons including crew members were onboard plane which local media at the crash site, said, the rescue team have switched the rescue operation to recovery after presuming 177 persons dead late night on Sunday according to South Korea local time, and to continue the search on Monday morning for the remaining two persons.

South Korea’s Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, Park Sang-woo said on Sunday that the government will mobilise all available resources to ensure swift rescue operations and manage the aftermath of the accident at Muan airport in the south of the country.

Park also apologised and expressed condolences to victims’ families and the public, as the minister responsible for overseeing aviation administration.

South Korea’s transport ministry said; Jeju Air flight 7C2216, arriving from the Thai capital Bangkok with 181 people on board, was attempting to land shortly after 9am at the airport in the south of the country.

Videos posted online showed the twin-engine Boeing 737-800 skidding down the runway with no apparent landing gear before slamming into a wall in an explosion of flame and debris.

Local media reported that two crew members, a man and a woman, were rescued from the tail section of the burning plane, Muan fire chief Lee Jung-hyun told a briefing. The fire was extinguished as of 1pm, Lee said, according to the media.

“Only the tail part retains a little bit of shape, and the rest looks almost impossible to recognise,” he said.

Authorities have switched from rescue to recovery operations and because of the force of the impact, are searching nearby areas for bodies possibly thrown from the plane, Lee added.

South Korea’s transport ministry said on Sunday that its investigation unit secured both of the two black boxes from the crashed passenger jet.

A total of 176 passengers and crew were reportedly presumed dead, with three missing, after the Jeju Air plane, carrying 181 passengers and crew on a flight from Thailand, attempted a belly landing at the airport.

A bird strike has emerged as a possible factor in Sunday’s crash, Korean media Yonhap reported.

A bird strike and adverse weather conditions were cited by authorities as likely causes of the crash that flung passengers out of the plane and left it “almost completely destroyed”, according to fire officials.

International News Agencies reported that; inside the airport terminal, tearful family members gathered to wait for news, with the boards typically used for arrival and departure information displaying names, dates of birth and nationalities of the victims.

According to Reuters, News1 agency reported that a passenger on the aircraft texted a relative to say that a bird was stuck in the plane’s wing. The person’s final words were reportedly, “Should I say my last words?”

The fire department issued a statement regarding the crash. The department said, “The plane is almost completely destroyed, and identifying the deceased is proving difficult. The process is taking time as we locate and recover the remains.”

Jeju Airlines CEO, Kim E-bae issued an official statement on the company website and held a press conference. “First, we bow our heads in apology to everyone who has trusted Jeju Air. At approximately 9:03 AM on 29 December, flight 7C2216 from Bangkok to Muan caught fire while landing at Muan International Airport.

Above all, we express our deepest condolences and apologies to the families of the passengers who lost their lives in this accident.

At present, the cause of the accident is difficult to determine, and we must await the official investigation results from the relevant government agencies,” the CEO said in the statement.

Meanwhile, Bangkok Post in a news report, stated that: “South Korea’s acting President, Choi Sang-mok arrived at the scene of the deadliest air disaster on the country’s soil on Sunday, he had been on the job for less than 48 hours.

Choi, the country’s finance minister, became acting leader on Friday night after the impeachment of Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who had been acting president since President Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached and suspended from power on December 14 following his short-lived attempt to impose martial law.

The bewildering turnover at the top of Asia’s fourth-largest economy and one of its most vibrant democracies left the government scrambling when Jeju Air flight 7C2216 slammed into a wall at Muan International Airport on Sunday, killing most of the 181 people on board.

Choi visited the site a few hours after the crash and declared it a special disaster zone.

“The government would like to offer its sincere condolences to the bereaved families and will do its best to recover from this accident and prevent a recurrence,” he said.

Behind the scenes, government offices were still figuring out the chain of command and how press statements would be released, a ministry spokesperson and four other officials told Reuters. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning.

“Today, Choi went to Muan with land ministry officials, not finance ministry officials,” a spokesperson said. “A team of transportation ministry officials and safety ministry officials will report directly to Choi regarding the Muan plane crash for next few weeks. As for how we will distribute press releases on all his schedules – still undecided.”

Each ministry involved in foreign policy, administrative issues or safety has teams reporting to Choi, but Yoon’s presidential staff does not, and Choi is operating from a government complex in Seoul rather than any official residence, one official said.

A senior finance ministry official said it is still undecided who, if anyone, from Yoon’s and Han’s offices would report to Choi. Some of Choi’s duties as finance minister have been delegated to the vice minister, the ministry official added.

“The central disaster control team meetings are minister-level meetings, so the land minister and safety minister report directly to Choi,” this official said.

Choi is leading that centralised disaster control team instead of the prime minister, who would typically be in charge based on a manual prepared after the 2014 sinking of the ferry Sewol, which killed 304 people, and the Itaewon Halloween crowd crush that killed 159 people in 2022, a fourth official said.

The political upheaval in South Korea was sparked when Yoon unexpectedly declared martial law on December 3, only to rescind the order within hours after parliament defied military and police cordons to vote against Yoon”.

Reuters also reported that the previous most deadly air accident in South Korea was in 2002, when a Boeing 767-200 operated by Air China crashed into a hill near South Korea’s southeastern port city of Busan, killing 129 people and injuring 37.

The crash at Muan International Airport is the first fatal accident involving the country’s biggest budget airline, which was founded in 2005, according to the International News Agency.

“In September 1983, Korea Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet jet when it strayed into Soviet airspace over Sakhalin island, killing all 269 people on board.

In July 1993, a Boeing 737-500 operated by Asiana Airline landed several kilometers (miles) short of the runway at South Korea’s Mokpo airport in poor weather. More than 60 people died.

In August 1997, Korean Air flight 801, a Boeing 747-3B5B (747-300) operated by Korean Air, plowed into a hill near Guam’s international airport, killing 228 out of 254 persons on board”, data reported according to Reuters.