Onlookers who witnessed a passenger plane crash at an airport in South Korea have described hearing \u2018explosions\u2019 before the aircraft slammed into a concrete wall.\n\n\n\n\n\n

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At least 176 people out of a total of 181 on board have now been declared dead in what is South Korea\u2019s worst domestic civil aviation disaster ever, after the 15-year-old Boeing 737-800 jet crash landed at Muan International Airport, about 180 miles south of Seoul.\n
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The incident took place at 9.03am local time after the front\u00a0landing gear\u00a0of the plane apparently failed to deploy, forcing the pilot to make a crash landing.\n\n\n
Footage from the airport\u00a0showed the plane skidding across the runway before it collided with the wall, where it was later seen engulfed in smoke and flames.\n
Recovery efforts are ongoing at the time of writing (December 29), and witnesses have now come forward to describe what they saw and heard as the crash took place.\n
According to\u00a0the Yonhap News Agency, 41-year-old Yoo Jae-yong was staying at a rental house near the\u00a0airport\u00a0when he saw the Jeju Air plane approaching the runway.\n
He remembered seeing a spark on the plane\u2019s right wing, and recalled: \u201cI was telling my family there was a problem with the plane when I heard a loud explosion.\u201d\n
Another witness, identified only the name Cho, was out talking a walk a couple of miles away from the airport when he saw the plane making its descent.\n
\u201cI saw the plane descending and thought it was about to land when I noticed a flash of light,\u201d Cho said to the\u00a0news\u00a0agency. \u201cThen there was a loud bang followed by smoke in the air, and then I heard a series of explosions.\u201d\n
Unusual sounds were also reported by 70-year-old Kim Yong-cheol, who heard the sound of \u2018metallic scraping\u2019 twice about five minutes before the crash.\n
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$\"Witnesses$ \n\n
Witnesses reported hearing \u2018scraping\u2019 and \u2018explosions\u2019\u00a0\n\n
Kim watched the plane struggle to make its initial landing, forcing it to ascend again for a second attempt. He then heard a \u2018loud explosion\u2019 and saw \u2018black smoke billowing into the sky\u2019.\n
Officials have shared suspicions that a\u00a0bird\u00a0strike may have been the cause of the crash after the airport\u2019s control tower warned the plane of a bird strike.\n
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The tower also gave the plane\u2019s pilot permission to land in a different area.\n\n\n\n\n
The plane\u2019s black box has been recovered to provide officials with data relating to the time of the crash, and Senior Transport Ministry official Joo Jong-wan has said that officials are also looking for the cockpit voice recording device.\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Witnesses also heard \u2018metallic scraping\u2019 before the crash in South Korea Onlookers who witnessed a passenger plane crash at an airport in South Korea have described hearing \u2018explosions\u2019 before the … \n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5618,"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5616\/revisions\/5618"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scenicwhispers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}