The fire spread quickly after starting near the end of the plane’s cabin. But the captain, despite being informed of the escalating danger, did not announce an evacuation order on the intercom.
What followed was a chaotic scene of nearly 170 passengers shouting and pushing one another in panic, desperate to get off the plane and save their lives.
It was Tuesday night, at the airport in Busan, South Korea, with millions celebrating the Lunar New Year holiday. Some were headed to Hong Kong, on Air Busan Flight ABL391, which was running late. It was still on the ground minutes after its scheduled takeoff of 10:15 p.m., when passengers spotted a flame in the overhead bins in the plane’s rear left.
The incident happened barely a month after the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil, and that tragedy, which involved another budget airline, probably would have been fresh on the minds of people onboard.
“Flames were coming out of the gaps between the overhead bin doors,” Shin Min-su, who was on the flight, told reporters later. “People were screaming trying to get out, but there was a line so they were stuck.”
Mr. Shin said he got up to try to put out the fire. But when he attempted to open the overhead bins, a flight attendant told him not to.
The cabin crew reported the situation to the captain, who shut off the plane’s hydraulic and fuel systems and, according to the airline, declared an emergency evacuation. But passengers got no word of this. The airline would say later, “there was no time for a separate announcement.”
“A lot of smoke filled up inside,” Jeong Yeong-jun, another passenger told KBS, a South Korean broadcaster. “From then on, the passengers just kept pushing forward, shouting around me, ‘Open the door, open the door!’”
Kim Dong-wan and other passengers told reporters that they had opened some of the plane’s doors on their own and jumped onto the slides, to escape. At least one of the emergency doors was opened by a flight attendant, Yonhap News Agency reported.
Air Busan did not provide a detailed accounting of the evacuation by Wednesday evening, but all 176 people on board — including 169 passengers, two pilots, four flight attendants and a flight engineer — survived. Three passengers sustained minor injuries from the evacuation process, while four flight attendants were briefly hospitalized after inhaling smoke, the airline said.
After escaping, some passengers began filming the scene and sharing videos with news organizations. The footage showed smoke billowing out of an emergency exit as passengers slid down the emergency slides, some rolling off onto the tarmac with no one helping them to land.
People yelled for their families. “We’re lucky we didn’t take off!” someone said.
Firefighters reached the scene minutes later, after the plane had emptied out. They focused on saving the plane’s wings because 35,000 pounds of fuel was stored there. The blaze was extinguished by 11:30 p.m., but the fuselage of the Airbus A321-200 jet was destroyed.
The lack of an announcement to passengers raises concerns about whether Air Busan’s crew had followed standard safety procedures, aviation experts said.
Kim In-gyu, the managing director of the Korea Aerospace University’s Flight Training Center, said that proper protocol required the captain to announce emergency procedures on the cabin’s intercom. He added that the flight attendants should typically guide passengers by using megaphones to give them clear, short commands.
“Ideally, the cabin crew would take charge of evacuating the aircraft,” said Keith Tonkin, an aviation expert and managing director of Aviation Projects in Brisbane, Australia. In a best-case scenario, “passengers would be following directions,” he said.
Mr. Kim added that the flight attendants should have first moved the passengers away from the fire. Then they should have gone down the slides first, helped passengers coming down and directed them away from the slides. Finally, he said, the airplane doors that were not emergency exits were supposed to be opened only by crew members.
In a statement, Air Busan, a subsidiary of Asiana Airlines, one of South Korea’s two main airlines, said its crew had followed protocol, and apologized to its customers. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
On Wednesday, the transport ministry said that it had conducted a counterterrorism investigation and found that no prohibited items had been carried onto the aircraft.
Over the past few weeks, South Korean transport officials have been under pressure to overhaul the nation’s aviation safety standards. The crash on Dec. 29, in which a Jeju Air jet crashed at Muan International Airport, killed 179 people. Only two people onboard survived.
A safety inspection by the government found that seven South Korean airports altogether had concrete structures containing navigation devices near their runways, similar to the one in Muan — into which the Jeju Air jet crashed and which did not meet safety recommendations. The authorities also found that several budget airlines had failed to comply with safety checks.
Last week, the government ordered nine low-cost carriers to tighten safety measures that include reducing flight hours, improving pilot training and increasing the number of maintenance workers.
On Wednesday, one passenger from the Air Busan flight remained in the hospital. The airline canceled eight flights planned for Wednesday at the airport, known formally as Gimhae International Airport, but all other flights operated normally.
Mr. Kim, the aviation expert, said that it was fortunate that the fire had broken out before the plane took off.
“If the plane had been on time, if it were in flight,” he said, “it would have been a very serious situation.”