Fourteen families of people on a Jeju Air plane that crashed in South Korea last year sued Boeing in the United States this week, the latest in a series of lawsuits over an accident that killed 179 of the 181 people on board the passenger jet.
The Jeju Air plane exploded into a fireball when it struck a concrete-reinforced berm at the end of the runway after belly landing at a South Korean airport in December 2024. It was the deadliest plane crash on South Korean soil and, at the time, the deadliest worldwide since 2018.
Investigators are still trying to find out what caused the crash. They are looking at several possible factors including a bird strike that the pilots reported before the crash, the lethal berm at the end of the runway, and the pilots’ decision to shut down the plane’s less-damaged engine.
As the crash investigation continues, the victims’ families are pursuing several strategies to seek justice for their relatives.
Several lawsuits filed in American courts this year have accused Boeing of failing to update the systems on the plane, a 737-800, that had been designed to help the pilots land safely in emergencies.
On Tuesday, 14 South Korean families of victims sued Boeing in Washington State. Their lawsuit in state court said that the company deprived the pilots of the means to land safely by failing to modernize the plane’s electrical and hydraulic systems. It also accused Boeing of failing to provide adequate training for the pilots.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of compensation for damages resulting from what the families’ lawyers called Boeing’s negligence in the crash at Muan International Airport.
“It’s disappointing that no one has been punished for a major accident that killed 179 people,” said Lee Jeong-bok, 56, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and the father of a victim. “We had no choice but to sue.”
Representatives for Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lawsuits focus on aircraft defects, not on the airline, Jeju Air.
In August and September, some families of Jeju Air victims sued Boeing in Illinois, said William Chun, a family liaison for Wisner Law Firm, the Chicago-based firm representing them. The Illinois lawsuits started in state court. Some have been moved to federal court, where Boeing argued that the case needed to be litigated in South Korea.
Boeing has a significant presence in Washington State, where it was founded, and Illinois, its previous headquarters.
Kreindler & Kreindler, a New York law firm specializing in air disaster litigation, is also weighing how to proceed with filing a claim against Boeing on behalf of about 40 victims’ families, said Jason Ha, a lawyer in Seoul and the firm’s liaison in South Korea.
Boeing has used a well-established legal doctrine, known as “forum non conveniens,” to transfer cases related to crashes outside of the United States to the countries where they happened, Mr. Ha said.
Moving such a lawsuit to South Korea from the United States could be disadvantageous for families because the amount of compensation in any judgment or settlement would most likely be lower. South Korean courts would also not make as much of the evidence public.
An organization representing most of the 179 victims’ families in South Korea said on Thursday that it was not directly involved in the U.S. lawsuits.
Boeing is not the families’ only target. In May, 72 relatives of victims asked the South Korean police to investigate 15 officials and aviation industry executives, including the country’s transport minister and Jeju Air’s chief executive, over what they said were violations of aviation safety laws.
The families have not sued Jeju Air, but they may consider doing so once the crash investigation is over, a spokeswoman for the families’ main representative group said.
South Korean investigators said in a recent report that an analysis had found no pre-existing defects in either engine. Crash reports are generally not admissible in U.S. courts as direct evidence, said Charles Herrmann, the lawyer representing the 14 families in the Washington State lawsuit.
Among the several systems the lawyers said did not function before the crash, they highlighted the failure of the landing gear to deploy.
But even if a Boeing 737-800 loses both engines and its hydraulic systems, pilots can manually extend its landing gear. What remains unclear, experts say, is whether the crew ran out of time to do so, or whether they feared that deploying the gear might increase drag and cause the plane to fall short of the runway as they made a second attempt to land at the airport.
John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.
Mark Walker is an investigative reporter for The Times focused on transportation. He is based in Washington.
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