Relatives set up tent camp in airport

MUAN, South Korea — Outside South Korea’s Muan International Airport the smell of jet fuel is still in the air, days after a passenger jet belly-landed and skidded off the end of the runway, erupting into a fireball. 

Inside the departures terminal, dozens of yellow and beige tents have been set up for relatives to sleep in as rescuers search the wreckage for the bodies of their loved ones. No one wants to leave as the agonizing identification process takes place. 

It could take weeks or even months to identify the bodies of the 175 passengers and four crew members who were killed when the Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok came down at around 9 a.m. local time Sunday (7 pm ET Saturday).

Astonishingly, two flight attendants at the back of the plane survived, one reportedly asking doctors “what happened” and “why am I here,” to doctors after they blacked out.   

Lee Dong-Suk, who lost his aunt and uncle in the crash, told NBC News Monday that he thought the government should work faster to identify the bodies and provide families with more information. 

“At first the government told us that they found the bodies and that they were making efforts towards identifying them. So we waited and waited because they did not tell us how long we had to wait, where to wait and what to do,” he said. “So, it became an endless waiting with no end in sight for us.

“Honestly, I cannot accept what has happened and that they died. I feel like I am dreaming,” he said, adding that he was focusing on caring for his grieving family members. 

“My turn to allow the feelings of profound loss to get to me is only when I am alone at night,” he said. “I might be able to accept the reality when I see their photos during the funeral procession. How can you accept that it was only a week ago that they left you saying they are going on a nice trip but that they will never return home,” he added. 

In the meantime, the search continues with American investigators joining their South Korean counterparts Tuesday. 

They arrived at the scene the day after  South Korea’s Acting President Choi Sang-mok ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operation. The country’s National Police Agency also said it was making all-out efforts to speed identification of the bodies, by allocating more personnel and equipment such as rapid DNA analysers.

There is still no definitive answer on what exactly caused the crash, but two black boxes retrieved from the aircraft — the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder — were transferred to a test center Monday morning.

But at a briefing Monday Yu Kyung-soo, director of aviation safety policy at South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, or MOLIT, said in a briefing Monday that the pilot issued a “bird strike” warning, used to alert a collision between at least one bird and an aircraft, shortly before the crash. 

The pilot then declared “mayday,” Yu said.