On the morning that the ill-fated Jeju Air flight was headed to its destination in southwestern South Korea, Lee Geun-young was near the airport, getting ready to open a restaurant serving mud-flat octopus, a local delicacy.

Half an hour later, Lee shot videos that were among the first the world saw of the Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 crash that killed all but two of the 181 people on board. In an interview with The New York Times, he talked about the challenge of dealing with the shock of what he had seen.

Lee’s restaurant, along a road about 330 yards from Muan International Airport where the plane was about to land, has a clear view of the southern end of the runway, close to the water. Lee, 48, recalled that it was a sunny morning and that he had seen birds at a nearby beach.

‘Something wrong’

Around 8.57am, I heard bangs. They sounded like incomplete combustion from motorbikes but louder and unfamiliar... I left my kitchen and went outside to the restaurant parking lot and looked up at the sky. I saw the airplane. It was above my restaurant instead of over the runway. And the plane was tilted a bit to the right. It looked to me like the plane was about to make a landing, only towards my restaurant rather than toward the runway... I went to the back of my restaurant to watch the back of the plane. The plane was higher in the sky than when I watched it earlier, and as it ascended, it was making a circle toward the right, doing a U-turn. It felt like this circle was a really small one. I felt that there was something definitely wrong with this plane and that I should take a video. That’s why I walked up to the rooftop... shot the first video.

One or two seconds after the crash, I felt a sudden rush of heat on my face like you would when you opened the door to a sauna. “Do I need to get out of here?” I thought.

I saw two or three residual blasts during this time. The first blast was so big that I could see fragments spurting... when the smaller blasts occurred, I only saw smoke and flames... the firefighter trucks couldn’t go near the site. They spread the water from about 100 to 130 feet away.

‘I choke up’

I couldn’t sleep last night. Every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing afterimages of the blast from the crash.... Every time I go on the internet and see the news of the plane crash or related footage, I choke up.