Aircraft charter specialist, Air Charter Service, is reporting growing interest from large corporations enquiring about evacuation contingency plans for expat staff in South Korea in case the situation in the North escalates further.

This comes on the back of the news that in the last few hours Australian Defence officials have announced that they are working on plans to evacuate around 7,000 Australians from South Korea.

Gavin Copus, Business Development Director at ACS, commented: “We have spoken to security companies that assess travel risk management and crisis avoidance and it seems that the situation is classed as an Amber Alert. This means companies are looking at contingency planning, and some non-essential staff and families of expats are already starting to move on commercial flights out of South Korea. “Having received requests for contingency planning options from UK, Asian and US contacts, we have put together an Evacuation Planning Guide and the idea is for us to be ready. Whilst we are confident that the

situation will be resolved peacefully, planning for the worst is essential as we know how quickly circumstances can change.”

ACS has extensive experience of evacuations having arranged the extraction of more than 10,000 foreign nationals from northern Africa during the Arab Spring in 2011 including flights out of Tripoli and Benghazi.

The Air Charter Service Evacuation Planning Guide - Korean Peninsula (523kb pdf) is available here