MUAN, South Korea – Outside South Korea’s Muan International Airport, the smell of jet fuel is still in the air, days after a passenger plane landed and skidded off the runway, exploding in a fireball .
Inside the departure terminal, dozens of yellow and beige tents have been set up for relatives to sleep while rescuers search the rubble for the bodies of their loved ones. No one wants to leave while the harrowing identification process takes place.
It could take weeks or even months to identify the bodies of the 175 passengers and four crew members who died when Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok crashed around 9 a.m. local time on Sunday (7 p.m. ET on Saturday).
Surprisingly, two flight attendants in the back of the plane survived and one of them reportedly asked doctors “what happened” and “why am I here” after fainting.
Lee Dong-Suk, who lost his aunt and uncle in the crash, told NBC News on Monday that he thought the government should work faster to identify the bodies and provide more information to the families.
“At first the government told us that they had found the bodies and were making efforts to identify them. So we waited and waited because they didn’t tell us how long we had to wait, where to wait and what to do,” he said. “So, it became an endless wait with no end in sight for us.
“Honestly, I cannot accept what happened and that they died. “I feel like I’m dreaming,” she said, adding that she was focusing on caring for her grieving relatives.
“My turn to allow feelings of deep loss to wash over me is only when I’m alone at night,” he said. “Maybe I can accept reality when I see his photos during the funeral procession. “How can you accept that just a week ago they left you saying that they are going on a nice trip but that they will never return home?” he added.
Meanwhile, the search continues, with American investigators joining their South Korean counterparts on Tuesday.
They arrived at the scene a day after South Korea’s acting president, Choi Sang-mok, ordered an emergency safety inspection of all air operations in the country. The country’s National Police Agency also said it was making every effort to speed up the identification of the bodies, allocating more personnel and equipment such as rapid DNA analyzers.
There is still no definitive answer as to what exactly caused the crash, but two black boxes recovered from the plane – the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder – were transferred to a testing center on Monday morning.
But in a briefing on Monday, the pilot issued a warning of ” “bird strike”, used to warn of a collision. between at least one bird and a plane, shortly before the accident.
The pilot then declared “Mayday,” Yu said.
