The Korean Air A330 at Mactan Is Being Taken Apart

There is a stretch of road along the southwestern edge of Mactan-Cebu International Airport where the fence is chain link, topped with razor wire, and low enough to see over. On the afternoon of 23 August 2026, an Airbus A330 lay on the other side of it in pieces.

Both wings had been cut off at the root. The engines were on the grass. The rear fuselage, vertical fin still attached, had been separated from the rest of the aircraft and tipped onto the ground. Sections of cabin sat in the weeds under orange tarpaulins. Everything was painted the same flat green, and nothing on any of it carried a name.

The aircraft is HL7525. It is the one that overran the runway here on the night of 23 October 2022, operating as Korean Air flight 631 from Seoul.

What is on the ground

Suroy.ph photographed the site from the public side of the perimeter on 23 August 2026, between 2:25 and 2:31 in the afternoon, from 10.2942° N, 123.9699° E. That is about 370 meters east of the position where the aircraft came to rest in 2022.

What the frames show, in order: a wing cut through at the root with the internal wing box open, its ribs bare chromate green and its hydraulic lines exposed. A main landing gear leg still hanging from the cut section. Engine cowlings and nacelle rings lying separately on the grass. The rear fuselage, cut free of the rest of the airframe and tipped over with the fin and both horizontal stabilisers still attached. Cabin barrel sections resting in dry grass. Scaffolding towers standing against the larger pieces.

One row of cabin windows is still legible along the green fuselage. No titles, no logo and no registration are visible anywhere on the airframe from the road.

When Suroy.ph photographed the same hull from the same fence on 27 March 2024, it was standing on its own landing gear, wings on, fin up, in one piece. No announcement of a teardown has been published between then and now.

The aircraft

HL7525 was an Airbus A330-322 powered by Pratt and Whitney PW4168s. It first flew on 12 May 1998 and was delivered on 26 June 1998, which made it twenty-four years old on the night it stopped flying. Planespotters.net lists it as damaged beyond repair on 23 October 2022 and derelict at Cebu. It was the fourteenth A330 written off anywhere in the world, and Korean Air’s first hull loss since 1999.

The night of 23 October 2022

Korean Air 631 left Incheon for Cebu on a Sunday evening with 173 people on board, the figure the airline gave in its own statement that night. The weather at Mactan was thunderstorms and rain with visibility around 8,000 meters and a light southwesterly. The crew were landing on Runway 22. They went around twice.

The final report of the Aircraft Accident Investigation and Inquiry Board of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines places the decisive damage on the second approach rather than the third. Forward pitch control input from the captain combined with an increasing downdraft, the aircraft contacted the ground short of the runway, and the right main landing gear struck a 15 centimeter step at the cemented edge of Runway 22. That single strike produced multiple faults in the gear.

On the third approach, at 23:07 local time, the aircraft touched down and could not stop. Braking failed. The report records it leaving the paved surface at about 83 knots. It struck the localiser antenna and the approach lighting and came to rest roughly 235 meters past the runway end, in grass, at 10.2949° N, 123.9666° E.

The nose gear and the forward lower fuselage were torn away and a hole opened in the upper fuselage. Twenty people were hurt, one flight crew member, four cabin crew and fifteen passengers, all injuries minor. Nobody was killed. More than a hundred flights were cancelled while the airport was shut.

Why it is green

In December 2022 the aviation press reported that Korean Air had repainted the wreck. Not repaired, repainted. The powder blue livery went, and with it the titles and the tail marking, replaced by a flat green over the entire airframe. Airlines commonly obscure branding on a written-off aircraft. Doing it to a hull that then sat in open view of a public road for years is a different proposition, and it is why most people who drive past have no idea what they are looking at.

One marking was reported left in place at the time, the registration HL7525 in black on the underside of the wings. In the 23 August frames the cut wing sections face the fence and no registration is legible from the road.

How long it stood

• 23 October 2022. The overrun. The airport closes.
• 25 October 2022. The airport reopens, two days after the accident.
• Early November 2022. Two weeks on, coverage notes the salvage moving slowly, with only a cargo door removed.
• 17 November 2022. Mactan-Cebu International Airport Authority general manager Julius Neri Jr. says the disabled aircraft has been moved to a safer location and flights can operate unhampered. The aircraft had settled in soft ground and a road had to be built to reach it.
• 27 March 2024. Suroy.ph photographs the hull intact from the perimeter fence.
• 7 March 2025. The AAIIB final report is dated. Coverage at the time describes the hull still at the airport, stripped of salvageable parts.
• 23 August 2026. Suroy.ph photographs it cut into sections.

What the report asked for

The board issued one safety recommendation, addressed to CAAP’s air navigation office, concerning the compliance of runway threshold conditions with ICAO standards. Put plainly, part of what the investigation found was on the ground rather than in the cockpit.

The airport around it

None of this affects a passenger today. Runway 22 has been in normal use since two days after the accident, and Mactan opened a second runway, 04L/22R, on 18 July 2025. For terminals, transfers, fares and everything else about using the airport, see the Suroy.ph guide to Mactan-Cebu International Airport.

Sources

• Aircraft Accident Investigation and Inquiry Board, Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, final report on HL7525, dated 7 March 2025
• Korean Air statement, 23 October 2022, for the occupant figure
• Julius Neri Jr., general manager, Mactan-Cebu International Airport Authority, on the 17 November 2022 relocation
• Planespotters.net airframe record for HL7525
• Aviation trade coverage, December 2022, on the repaint and the retained wing registration
• Photographs by Suroy.ph, 27 March 2024 and 23 August 2026

Photographed and checked on 23 August 2026.