An Air Busan plane caught fire at an airport in Busan, South Korea, on Tuesday night, forcing all passengers and crew members to evacuate, officials said.
The plane, an Airbus A321, had been scheduled to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport, fire officials said, when a fire broke out near its tail at around 10:30 p.m., before takeoff.
All 176 people on board — 169 passengers, six flight attendants and a flight engineer — escaped through evacuation slides, South Korea’s Transport Ministry said in a statement. Some minor injuries were reported, and at least two of the passengers were hospitalized with bruises they suffered while evacuating, the Transport Ministry said.
Videos and photos of the blaze broadcast on local media showed fire engines battling flames on the plane’s fuselage as smoke billowed off the aircraft. The aircraft’s inflatable evacuation slides were deployed. Around 11:30 p.m., the fire was extinguished, the fire department said.
It was not immediately clear what had caused the blaze. Investigators from the Transport Ministry and its Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board will investigate the matter, the ministry said.
Air Busan, a low-cost carrier that operates domestic and international flights to and from Busan, is a subsidiary of Asiana Airlines, one of South Korea’s two main airlines. The plane had arrived in Busan from Jeju just before 9 p.m. local time, according to Flightradar24, a flight tracking service.
Days earlier, the country’s transportation officials had urged low-cost airline carriers to prioritize safety over profit, following a crash last month that was the worst aviation disaster ever on South Korean soil. That crash, in which a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air smashed into a concrete wall at Muan International Airport, killed 179 people and raised questions over aviation safety measures.
A safety inspection by the Transport Ministry found that seven South Korean airports and several of the nation’s airlines were breaching existing safety standards.
The plane that caught fire on Tuesday had the registration number HL7763, the Transport Ministry said, and was listed as Flight ABL391. It is a 17-year-old Airbus A321-200 built in 2007, according to the ministry’s Aviation Technical Information System. It had been operated by Air Busan’s parent company, Asiana Airlines, until it was handed over to Air Busan in May 2017, according to Transport Ministry records.
Airbus and Asiana Airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The plane seats 195 passengers and is one of eight such aircraft operated by Air Busan, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm. It is leased to the airline from AerCap, an Irish company that leases jets to carriers around the world.
The jet was built in 2007 and uses engines manufactured by International Aero Engines, a joint venture of Pratt & Whitney, Japanese Aero Engine Corporation and MTU Aero Engines in Germany.
Globally, there are more than 1,500 airplanes in active service from the same A321 generation as the jet involved in the incident, according to Cirium data. The oldest are more than 30 years old, which experts say isn’t unusual or unsafe, provided the jets are well maintained.
