Already 30 minutes behind schedule, the pilot flying the Jeju Air jet with 181 people on board was preparing to land at his destination in southwestern South Korea on Sunday morning when the control tower warned him about flocks of birds in the area.
Two minutes later, at 8:59 a.m., the pilot reported a “bird strike” and “emergency,” officials said. He told the air traffic control tower at Muan International Airport that he would do “a go-around,” meaning he would abort his first landing attempt and circle in the air to prepare for a second attempt. But he apparently did not have enough time to go all the way around.
Instead, just a minute later, the veteran pilot — with nearly 7,000 flight hours in his career — was approaching the runway from the opposite direction, from north to south. And three minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., his plane, Jeju Air Flight 7C2216, slammed into a concrete structure off the southern end of the runway in a ball of flames.
All but two of the 181 people on board were killed, most of them South Koreans returning home after a Christmas vacation in Thailand. The crash was the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil and the deadliest worldwide since that of Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018, when all 189 people on board died.
As officials were racing to investigate the crash, a central question has emerged among analysts: What happened during the four minutes between the pilot’s urgent report of bird strike and the plane’s fatal crash?
Footage of the Boeing 737-800 landing at the airport showed it skidding down the runway without its landing gear deployed. As it hurtled along on its belly, engulfed by what looked like clouds of dust, smoke and sparks, it did not seem able to slow its speed before slamming into the concrete structure 820 feet after the end of the runway.
“A big question is why the pilot was in such a hurry to land,” said Hwang Ho-won, chairman of the Korea Association for Aviation Security.
When pilots plan to do a belly landing, they usually try to buy time, dumping extra fuel from the air and allowing time for the ground staff to prepare for the emergency, Mr. Hwang said. But the Jeju Air pilot apparently decided that he didn’t have such time, he said. “Did he lose both engines?” Mr. Hwang said. “Was the decision to land in such a hurry a human error?”
Officials recovered the plane’s “black box,” an electronic flight recorder that contains cockpit voice and other flight data that would help the investigation of aviation accidents. The device was partially damaged, so it could take time to recover the data, said Ju Jong-wan, a director of aviation policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.
With the investigation still at a preliminary stage, officials were careful not to make any pre-emptive declarations on questions arising from the crash, including whether both of the plane’s engines were out when it was landing. But experts who have watched the footage of the landing said the plane appeared to experience a fatal combination of factors that made the crash far worse than it could have been.
The Muan airport normally has a 9,200-foot-long runway. But when the Jeju Air plane was landing, only 8,200 feet of it was usable because of construction work underway to extend the runway. (Still, this is long enough for landing 737-800s, officials say.) On Sunday, the plane also missed the usual touchdown zone and instead touched down farther along the runway than normal.
As it landed, the plane’s pilot also appeared unable to control both its engines and landing gear, depriving him of two of the plane’s three key means of slowing down: the landing gear brake and the engines’ reverse thrusts, aviation experts said. They said the plane also did not appear to have activated its wing flaps, another means of cutting down speed.
The plane went so fast that it overshot the runway and rammed straight into a concrete structure surrounded by an earth mound. The structure was built to install the so-called localizer antenna, which helps enable the pilot to maintain the correct approach path.
Mr. Ju said that such a concrete structure was found in other airports in South Korea and abroad. It was built according to regulations but the government planned to investigate whether the rules should be revised in the wake of the Jeju Air crash, he said. Some experts, including Mr. Hwang, said that if there had been no such concrete structure or if the antenna had been installed on a more easily breakable mount, the plane might have avoided tragedy.
But they also stressed that the plane’s trouble began before it hit the structure.
“Engine trouble doesn’t necessarily mean landing gear trouble; the two are not necessarily related,” said Paek Seung-joo, a professor of public safety at Open Cyber University of Korea. “But in this case, both appear to have happened, forcing the plane to decide to do a belly landing in a matter of minutes.”
Even if the plane had lost one engine to a bird strike, the pilot still could have been able to operate a hydraulic pump to lower the landing gear with the power from the other engine, said J. Y. Jung, an aviation expert at Khyungwoon University in South Korea.
And analysts said if both engines were lost, the pilot could still manually lower the landing gear. But given the hurried way the pilot attempted to land, he might not have had enough time, they said.
“Questions like these won’t be answered until they examine the plane’s flight data recorder,” Mr. Jung said.
Scrutiny has also fallen on the risk of bird strikes. Migrant birds travel along the western coast of the Korean Peninsula because its tidal flats provide them with ideal resting and feeding places. The Muan airport was surrounded by such places and was more prone to bird strike than other airports in South Korea, according to government data about bird strikes. Officials said they would investigate whether the airport had implemented government recommendations for keeping birds away.
Officials said they would also look into whether Jeju Air cut corners on safety while trying to maximize profit. Jeju Air is the biggest of South Korea’s nine low-cost carriers and is among the most aggressive in attracting passengers. Its planes put in more hours than its competitors’, officials said. Within the 48 hours of its crash in Muan, the Jeju Air plane had made a dozen trips within South Korea or to China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Japan.
The government also said it would conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines. They made the statement after a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 passenger jet departing from Gimpo Airport in Seoul on Monday, for the southern island of Jeju, reported a landing-gear issue after takeoff and returned to Gimpo.
Jeju Air said that the problem was fixed while the plane was in the air after the pilot consulted with the maintenance crew on the ground.
“But the pilot still wanted to return to the airport for a checkup for safety,” Song Kyong-hun, a Jeju Air executive, said.
The post From Bird Strike to Crash: the Mystery of the Korean Plane’s Four Fateful Minutes appeared first on New York Times.
