Crew members killed in South Korean navy plane crash
The P-3C patrol plane took off from its base in the south-eastern city of Pohang at 1:43pm local time (2:43pm AEST) on Thursday but fell to the ground due to unknown reasons, the navy said.
Cho Young-sang, a navy officer overseeing the search efforts, said in a televised briefing that workers found the bodies of two crew members and were preparing to transfer them to a nearby hospital.
He said workers were continuing to search for the other two.
The navy said it had established a task force to investigate the cause of the crash and temporarily suspended all flights of P-3s.
There have been no reports from the navy of civilian casualties on the ground.
Pohang's Nambu police station also confirmed the crash involved a navy patrol aircraft and it couldn't immediately confirm whether there were any deaths or injuries.
An emergency office in Pohang said that rescue workers and fire trucks were dispatched to the site after receiving reports from local residents that an unidentified aircraft fell onto a hill near an apartment complex and caused a fire.
The scale and damage of the fire wasn't immediately known.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency published photos showing firefighters and at least one water truck operating near the crash site, with flames flickering as black-grey smoke engulfed the trees.
The incident comes after a Jeju Air passenger plane crashed at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea in December, killing all but two of the 181 people on board.
That crash was one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea's aviation history.
AP
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