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SEOUL, South Korea – An unhappy year-end looms over South Korea’s winter of discontent as a politically polarized nation ponders the carnage caused by the crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 on Sunday morning.
A Boeing 737-800, en route from Bangkok and flown by the country’s leading low-cost airline, crash-landed at Muan in South Korea’s southwest, killing 179 of the 181 people aboard.
As bodies were identified and information was released, grieving relatives camped out Monday in government-supplied tents erected in the terminal at Muan International Airport.
Altars were being established nationwide, and flags were flying at half-staff as South Korea entered a week of mourning. Acting President Choi Sang-mok was overseeing a national disaster investigation just days after taking office.
The country is in the grip of a political crisis, with the president and his successor impeached this month. No end is in sight, with the presidency disempowered and the National Assembly at daggers drawn.
Other deadly disasters, notably the 2014 sinking of the ferry Sewol and a crowd crush on Halloween in Seoul in 2022, have adversely impacted presidential administrations. The crash investigation, however, is a technical matter.
SEE ALSO: Nearly 200 people dead in fiery airliner crash in South Korea
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing experts have joined the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate the disaster, Yonhap News Agency reported.
Three critical factors have been identified: a bird strike on the plane’s starboard engine, a decontrolled crash-landing without lowering the undercarriage, and a collision with a solid concrete structure just behind the runway.
Further questions were raised about three other landing gear/hydraulic incidents that impacted aircraft worldwide after the Muan crash.
Six minutes to tragedy
Authorities’ briefings and footage analysis show that events accelerated from airside crisis to landing pad disaster to incendiary tragedy in approximately six minutes.
In clear conditions, the control tower warned the pilot of Flight 2216 at 8:57 a.m. about a flock of birds in the airspace.
Three migratory bird sites surround Muan International Airport. South Korean media reported 10 bird-related incidents from 2019 through August 2024.
One minute later, the pilot declared Mayday, citing a bird strike. With the tower’s permission, the pilot attempted to land from the runway’s takeoff end.
In smartphone powerhouse South Korea, the doom of Flight 2216 was captured in footage shot by people in or around the airport and shared across social media.
One clip shows an apparent bird impact on the aircraft’s starboard jet intake, causing a “compressor stall,” or airflow disruption in the engine unit. It shows no explosion or engine fire.
Another clip shows the plane lined up to land without the landing gear deployed. The plane does not touch down until well along the length of the runway.
Subsequent clips show the aircraft skidding along on its belly with smoke, but not flame, streaming from its starboard engine.
The aircraft careened off the end of the runway directly into a concrete antenna base, exploded and disintegrated. It was 9:03 a.m.
Concrete structure was the killer
South Korean media questioned whether communications between the aircraft and the tower were flawed, notably whether it was essential for the plane to land so quickly.
The usual procedure is for a plane to go into a holding pattern while communicating with on-ground experts so the flight crew can go through checklists to resolve onboard problems.
The mass solidity of an earth-and-concrete base for airport navigation aids, known as localizer antennas, reportedly built last year, was widely criticized.
“I don’t know who designed that,” Denis Davydov, a pilot and former 737-800 captain, stated on YouTube’s Pilot Blog. Had the plane crashed into Muan’s perimeter wall, bricks would have been displaced and the impact would been less catastrophic, he said.
Calling it “a huge obstacle right off the end of the runway,” the berm was “a large contributor to the fact that there were only two survivors,” said Juan Browne, an air crash assessor on YouTube’s Blancolirio.
At most airports, localizer antennas have “a frangible, or breakable connection with the ground where, if struck, the antenna will easily break away,” Mr. Browne said.
The killing event was a barrier impact at high speed. The contributing factor was the nondeployment of landing gear and related decontrol on the runway.
What is happening to landing gear?
Damage to one engine of a 737-800 should not prevent it from flying on its second jet. Nor should it impact hydraulics or landing gear.
“A bird strike has nothing to do with hydraulics or landing gear. There is so much built-in redundancy,” said Mr. Browne. Citing 737 blueprints, he showed three independent hydraulic systems: two driven by jet engines and electric motors and the third by an electric motor.
If all fail, there is a manual fail-safe.
Mr. Davydov showed stock footage of a Boeing 737-800’s manually operated cable mechanism. Pilots use this mechanism to lower the undercarriage in the event of hydraulic failure.
Mr. Davydov said the undercarriage on Flight 2216 had not been lowered. Crash footage showed latches on the underside that had not been released.
Mr. Browne suggested that the crew had no time to review the safety protocols.
The Muan disaster was the first of four incidents worldwide related to landing gear in less than 24 hours.
A De Havilland DHC-8-402 Air Canada Express sustained “a suspected landing gear issue” at Halifax Stanfield International Airport in Nova Scotia. The event occurred around 9:30 p.m. local time on Dec. 29, after the Sunday morning Korean time disaster in Muan.
Footage shot from the cabin showed flames flaring on the plane’s port side, but there were no casualties.
Late on Dec. 29, Norway time, a Dutch commercial Boeing 737-800 veered off the right side of a runway after landing at Oslo Torp Sandefjord Airport. The flight diverted to land there shortly after takeoff from Oslo Airport, citing hydraulic failure.
No injuries were reported.
On Monday, another Boeing 737-800, again operated by Jeju Air, left Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport at 6:47 a.m. and returned soon after takeoff after onboard systems detected a landing gear issue.
It landed safely at 7:25 a.m.
It was unknown whether the four incidents were coincidences or whether an issue with engineering components and/or hydraulic fluid impacted different aircraft models operated by multiple airlines on different continents.
Correction: In a previous version of this article, Muan was misspelled in a few references to the airport.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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