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How the investigation of Fr the deadliest plane crash on South Korean soil, experts have cast doubt on whether suspected collision with a bird could cause such damage.
All but two of the 181 people on Jeju Air flight 7C2216 died on Sunday morning after the plane embarked on an unsuccessful emergency landing at South KoreaMaun International Airport. It flew in from Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, carrying dozens of Christmas tourists.
Among the passengers were five children under the age of 10, including a three-year-old.
Terrifying footage shows the plane skidding across the runway before crashing into a brick wall and bursting into flames. The only two survivors were the two crew members sitting in the back of the plane.
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The incident resulted in the highest death toll in a plane crash on South Korean soil in the country’s history. The country is otherwise known to have had strong record in flight safety during the last two decades.
“Why didn’t the firefighters put foam on the runway? Why weren’t they present when the plane landed? And why did the plane land so far down the runway? And why was there a brick wall at the end of the runway?” said Airline News editor Geoffrey Thomas.
South Korean officials said they were investigating the cause of the crash, including a possible bird strike, as it emerged that air traffic controllers had warned the pilots of the risk of a collision just three minutes before the plane crashed onto the runway. A minute after the warning, the pilots issued an email.
According to local media, a passenger on the flight sent a text message to a family member that the bird was “stuck in the wing” and that the plane could not land. “Shall I leave my last words?” the traveler then wrote.
Under global aviation rules, South Korea will conduct a civil investigation into the crash and automatically involve the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States, where the plane was designed and built. Jeju Air claimed that the accident was not due to “any maintenance issues”.
The flight data recorder was found at 11:30 local time (2:30 GMT), about two and a half hours after the crash, and the cockpit voice recorder was found at 2:24 p.m., according to South Korea’s Transport Ministry.
Investigators later told South Korean Yonhap news agency, however, that the recorder was damaged and that decoding could take up to a month.
Mr Thomas described the flight data recorder as the “heartbeat of the plane” which should provide clues about how the accident unfolded. There are probably several reasons for the accident.
Experts, however, said it was unlikely that a bird strike would have been the sole cause of the landing gear failure.
“A bird strike is not unusual, problems with the undercarriage are not uncommon. “Bird strikes happen much more often, but they usually don’t cause the loss of an aircraft in and of themselves,” Thomas said.
Australian airline safety expert Geoffrey Dell said: “I’ve never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from retracting.”
The bird strike could have affected CFM International’s engines if the flock had been drawn into them, but it would not have shut them down immediately, giving the pilots little time to deal with the situation, Dell said.
Experts also questioned why the pilots did not have time to slow down, as is customary, during an emergency landing.
Typically in a belly landing, “you’re going to land on the engines and you’re going to have a bumpy ride,” Thomas said.
“You go in with minimal fuel, you have fire engines covering the runway with foam and you land at the far end of the runway and usually it ends up being OK.”
Joo Jong-wan, the vice minister of transport, dismissed concerns about the use of the brick wall as a safety measure, saying both ends of the runway have “safety zones with green buffer zones before they reach the outer wall”.
He added that the airport was designed “according to standard aviation safety guidelines, even if the wall appears closer than it actually is.”
The flight captain worked in that capacity since 2019 and had 6,823 sorties, the Ministry of Transport announced. The first officer worked in that rank since 2023 and had about 1,650 flying hours.
The Boeing model involved in the crash, the 737-800, is one of the world’s most flown planes with a generally good safety record and was developed long before the MAX variant involved in Boeing’s recent safety crisis.