[Source: Reuters]

At least 124 people were killed when an airliner landed without wheels, veering off the runway and erupting in a fireball as it slammed into a wall at South Korea’s Muan International Airport on Sunday, the national fire agency said.

Jeju Air (089590.KS), opens new tab flight 7C2216, arriving from the Thai capital Bangkok with 181 people on board, was attempting to land shortly after 9 a.m. (0000 GMT) at the airport in the south of the country, South Korea’s transport ministry said.

It is the deadliest air accident involving a South Korean airline in nearly three decades, according to ministry data.

The twin-engine Boeing 737-800 can be seen in video from local media skidding down the runway with no apparent landing gear before slamming into a wall in an explosion of flame and debris. Other photos showed smoke and fire engulfing parts of the plane.

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 1 p.m., Lee said.

“Only the tail part retains a little bit of shape, and the rest of (the plane) 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.

The two crew were being treated at hospitals with medium to severe injuries, said the head of the local public health centre.

Authorities had worked to rescue people in the tail section, an airport official told Reuters shortly after the crash.

The crash is the worst by any South Korean airline since a 1997 Korean Air crash in Guam that killed more than 200 people, according to transportation ministry data.

Investigators are looking into bird strikes and weather conditions as possible factors, Lee said. Yonhap cited airport authorities as saying a bird strike may have caused the landing gear to malfunction.

The control tower issued a bird strike warning and shortly afterward the pilots declared mayday, a transport ministry official said, without specifying whether the flight said it struck any birds.

About one minute after the mayday call the aircraft made its ill-fated attempt to land, the official said.

A passenger texted a relative to say a bird was stuck in the wing, the News1 agency reported. The person’s final message was, “Should I say my last words?”

The passengers included two Thai nationals and the rest are believed to be South Koreans, according to the transportation ministry.

The Boeing 737-800 jet, operated by Jeju Air, was manufactured in 2009, the transport ministry said.