A man who allegedly opened an emergency exit on an Asiana Airlines flight in midair felt “suffocated” and wanted to get off quickly, South Korean police said yesterday.
The plane was carrying nearly 200 passengers on Friday as it approached the runway at Daegu International Airport, about 240km southeast of Seoul, on a domestic flight.
When the plane was about 200m above ground, the man, who police said was in his 30s without providing further details, opened the exit door. He was taken in by Daegu police for questioning and was quoted as telling officers that he had been “under stress after losing a job recently.”
Photo: AP
“He felt the flight was taking longer than it should have been and felt suffocated inside the cabin,” a Daegu police detective said. “He wanted out quickly.”
The passenger faces up to 10 years in prison if he is found guilty of contravening aviation safety laws.
Video footage recorded by a nearby passenger showed wind ripping through the open door, with fabric seat-backs and passengers’ hair flapping wildly as some people shouted in surprise.
Another video shared on social media showed passengers sitting in the emergency exit row next to an open door being buffeted by strong winds.
A dozen passengers were taken to hospital after experiencing breathing difficulties, but there were no major injuries or damage, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said.
“It was chaos with people close to the door appearing to faint one by one, and flight attendants calling out for doctors on board,” a 44-year-old passenger told Yonhap news agency. “I thought the plane was blowing up. I thought I was going to die like this.”
A transport ministry official said that this was “the first such incident” they were aware of in South Korean aviation history.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS