Tragically it appears that out of 181 onboard only two have survived. If true, this would be South Korea’s worst domestic civil aviation disaster. [1][2]
[1] https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20241229001054315 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/dec/29/south-kor...
After watching the video it’s amazing that anyone survived
Apparently two survivors are the crew members who were at the tail section. Even if (big if) their physical injuries are not critical, they are likely permanently psychologically scarred. I somehow doubt you can continue working in an airline after that.
“ a Serbian flight attendant who survived the highest fall without a parachute: 10.16 kilometres (6.31 miles) or 33,338 feet … She had little to no memory of the incident and had no qualms about flying in the aftermath of the crash. Despite her willingness to resume work as a flight attendant, Jat Airways (JAT) gave her a desk job negotiating freight contracts, feeling her presence on flights would attract too much publicity.“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87
Not everyone is that fragile.
A lot of people would assume that their odds of being involved in two crashes are basically zero and go on working.
A lot of people would assume that their odds of being involved in two crashes
Their odds?! These are crew members. They likely looked a good number of these people in the eye and interacted with them before seeing them all violently killed in front of them. That's a profoundly traumatizing experience.
Additionally, our brains aren't wired for odds. A veteran is unlikely to be hit by artillery in the US, but that doesn't stop them having PTSD episodes when fireworks go off.
Fragile? Did you watch the video?
How bad must it be for you?
Some other people would recognize that the failures are basically independent, so their odds of getting in another accident is the same.
Its probably not entirely independent, anyone who knows these two were the only survivors of a crash will probably work to ensure things are extra careful unconsciously
To the contrary, the psychological reaction is likely “If the nearly impossible could happen to me, the chances are much higher than I thought.” It may not be correct, but traumatic experiences don’t exactly lead to rational thought.
Interesting use of fragile - you must be an aviation accident survivor? I would love to hear the details!
Yeah, calling "fragile" someone who's afraid after an airplane crash has to be peak Hacker News
To be fair, the way he worded it called them NOT fragile. I think he has a point. We don't know how they are mentally, some might be fine, some might be not. Ascribing the way we think we would feel about it to the survivors feels wrong somehow.
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Look I understand the sentiment to be annoyed by some people think they are traumatised because someone called them by the wrong name or called them a bigot or something.
This is not that.
I think Aaron is referring more to the unreal expectations placed on people who experience shocking events. You'll hear things like "how can you still do this?" Or being treated like not a person, but a vessel to receive the sympathy of others. The expectations of you being "fucked up" or "scarred" is imposed on you from others and is obnoxious, if I'm being honest.
I'd go easy on him, it sounds like he may have experienced that feeling recently.
>The expectations of you being "fucked up" or "scarred" is imposed on you from others and is obnoxious,
It's worse than that. Societal expectations of whether one ought to be traumatized play a huge part in whether people are traumatized. So all these people are making the problem worse.
Fair point, I didn’t think of that possibility. And I do agree, it is sometimes like people see those kinds of traumas experienced by other people as marketing opportunities for themselves.
No one said "man-child" until you did.
Would it be reasonable to increase the length of the runway (or longer non-blocking area) based on these incidents, even if they are extremely rare.
Do gravel traps work with planes..?
Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS) are installed in the overrun area of many but certainly not all runways. No idea about this airport. And I’m not sure how effective EMAS is in a gear-up landing such as this accident.
EMAS does not help in a belly landing at all. It's engineered to be crushed by the wheels.
There’s similar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arresto...
Discussion on prune (professional pilots rumour network): https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/663324-jeju-737...
Interesting that everyone in the prune thread thinks bird strike is not the likely cause, but something else
IANAP but from what I know a plane can theoretically fly on one engine.
Basically every commercial aircraft are required to at least be able to fly straight and level on one engine. The 737 NG can climb perfectly fine on a single engine, especially since this one was at the destination and would have burned off most of the fuel.
> Basically every commercial aircraft are required to at least be able to fly straight and level on one engine.
Very nitpicky but I have to say it:
The requirement is „one engine out“, not „one engine available“.
This makes a significant difference when looking at planes with more than 2 engines, like a 747 or an A380. Those have to be flyable with 3 engines remaining (which gives them an advantage because 2 engine planes have to calculate takeoff with 1/2 engine performance while 4 engine planes can assume 3/4 engine performance).
The article itself says the landing gear wasn't deployed.
> Yonhap reported that the landing gear of the Boeing Co. 737-800 jet malfunctioned, causing it to land on its belly without its wheels deployed. It then hit a wall at the end of the runway.
From all the speculation about birds I'm guessing the article was updated with this after many of these comments.
Doesn’t seem to be unanimous - reading through, one working hypothesis is that the pilots were incapacitated or killed by bird strike - not impossible - and someone else was attempting landing.
Extremely unlikely considering the speed of the aircraft at the time of bird impact, and the fact the cockpit door is locked & it would take some time from others to enter it.
To me this seems more like pilots mishandling the situation after an engine failure caused by bird strike...
The previous worst Korean air disaster was mostly caused by crew communication failures. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801
I'll add that I'm not saying that is a factor in this at all - the accident report will do that in time.
This is from more than 25 years ago, there has been big changes since then.
I'm glad to hear there have been big changes. However, there is a more recent accident associated with a Korean operator: Asiana flight 214 crash at SFO in 2013.
The NTSB identified poor crew communication and crew resource management as important factors. Reuters and AFP reported negative repetitional impact to Korean air carriers.
They seemed perfectly lined up with the runway and descended at the right pace though. That’d be real tough for a non-pilot to achieve.
There are auto-landing systems now.
There was a video of a layman in a pilot seat (in a professional simulator) guided over radio landing plane with just few simple actions.
Here, found it - https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1dhi0...
Then they’d have lost comms with the ATC which would have been mentioned by now surely? With two pilots incapacitated in a go-around procedure?
Sure but that needs to be set up and configured. I just don’t think there’s enough time in the scenario for ATC to guide a non-pilot to do it. And if they got that guidance, why no flaps and gears? I am quite convinced the pilots themselves had control of the aircraft.
In every airliner model?
Yes, of course. Even in paper ones.
Maybe I’m missing something - how would pilots sitting inside the plane be incapacitated by birds on the outside
Someone not familiar with the front windshield of cars might think they go straight through. Don't think airplanes have any less strong windshields than cars.
A deep-frozen bird hitting the windshield straight on might be a problem but a live bird hitting at less than 45 degrees is not a problem for the plane or the pilots. The bird becomes red mist.
Depends on the size of the bird.
They can definitely go through plane windshields.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-f40a81ebb9201ba52c7e3...
I don't think you can directly compare the windshields on a plane like that with a 737NG.
Planes fly very fast
Commercial airliner windows are chemically strengthened and designed to withstand bird strikes, but it’s not impossible if you’re really unlucky.
See here for another plane with weaker glass: https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/12iqve4/...
Ah thanks. But even then, there’s two pilots for redundancy, so it would take an extreme event that both pilots got knocked out..?
It won’t be this. People on that forum talk about hitting many more birds at much higher speeds with much less issues. The landing gear should have been deployed before the strike too? Happened at 200 meters I believe?
That was a light aircraft with a very different windscreen. The ones in airliners are very tough.
"Top Answer" as of right now seems to say they were trying to go around but failed and tried to get out again, but "probably" with one engine because of "bird ingestion".
The speculation in this answer also seems plausible:
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/663324-jeju-737...
The article doesn't mention it, but there are videos [1] on the internet where the landing gear is clearly missing / not open. Some sources report that the landing gear broke because of an impact with some birds.
> landing gear broke because of an impact with some birds.
That seems...improbable.
That seems to be lost in translation. In my understanding of breaking news, some engine (not a landing gear) was broken due to the bird strike so the plane went around but landed without landing gears down.
Yes, after reading a bit more sources it looks like one of the engines failed 1km before landing. Not sure on why the landing gear wasn't deployed though.
From what I read it's possible for a bird strike to disrupt hydraulics. However there were probably a few additional engineering or pilot errors because that should not prevent a plane from putting down its landing gear, and a lack of landing gear should not prevent the plane from slowing down enough to not crash.
Its cases like these where I think the lining up of Swiss chesse model for failure makes a lot of sense
A bird strike in one engine could disrupt hydraulics yes but not all three circuits. It's weird. I'm sure there's more to this story.
Also the landing gear can be extended though gravity even without hydraulic pressure.
it is quite improbable. they can deploy landing gears using gravity so unless the birds killed that system(they can't) it was probably pilot error. just like in pakistan in 2020 that destroyed the engines so they couldn't perform the go around and they crashed.
One report I read here (I'm in South Korea) said the gear was down for the first aborted attempt and were then retracted for the go-around. I can't remember where I read that, however.
Yep, same thought - although I'm not an aviation expert. Some people think the pilot "forgot" to deploy the landing gear - which seems very unrealistic too.
I guess it's best to wait for an official investigation
Shockingly common in civilian aviation, it’s actually one of the most common causes for accidents. Not sure about commercial but it was not uncommon in the military in the 50s.
They say there are two kinds of pilots: those who have landed gear up, and those who will. I’ve seen it happen with small planes three times.
It should be quite rare on airliners due to having two pilots and good warning systems. It’s plausible that the pilot would forget, but both of them forgetting and never noticing the plane screaming at them is unlikely.
It's very easy to miss one alarm if there are several others going off simultaneously, which is highly likely if you've lost an engine due to a bird strike. Even if you hear or see the gear warning, you might be too cognitively overloaded to acknowledge and act on it.
> It's very easy to miss one alarm if there are several others going off simultaneously
The GPWS would literally be screaming "TOO LOW, GEAR" at you, over and over again. I find this difficult to believe. Being too distracted or overloaded to respond to it I can believe.
Perhaps there are too many alarms in case of a bird strike in a modern airliner? "Hydraulic pressure LOW","Voltage in System B Out of SPEC", "Cabinets in the kitchen area Open", "and by the way,the landing gear is not down".
One would imagine there are psychology experts at Boeing and others who do nothing else all day ,but decide if one or the other alarm should be prioritised and at which volume (too low and they don't hear it, too loud and it disorients).
It is a complex subject. I think in time we realise removing the third crew member was an error.
Most of those alarms would only be shown as text on the EICAS (Boeing) or ECAM (Airbus). Very few warning systems (the most important, like GPWS, TCAS, RAAS, the engine fire alarms, and the stall warning system) are aural and/or tactile in their annunciation.
EDIT: For a practical example, low hydraulic pressure in the left-hand system in a 777 would be yellow text on the EICAS that says "HYD SYS L".
I don’t think any 737 variant has an EICAS
the aviation term(probably others) for it is task saturation and loss of situational awareness.
I’m reading from aviation experts that the fundamental heuristic of “aviate, navigate, communicate” may have been forgotten as a result of panic following the bird strike incident (two minutes prior to the landing attempt). How should this principle have been executed in this situation?
Panic is understandable momentarily, but any professional pilot should be able to overcome that within a few seconds, and remember their training, which in an emergency is something like aviate, identify the problem if possible, and run checklists. Panic doesn't solve anything, and there's a comfort in having checklists and procedures to run. Something must have gone very wrong in training or with the plane for this to happen.
There's a standard short checklist for landing that includes flaps and landing gear. There may also be an emergency landing checklist that would also include those things.
The voice recorder and flight data recorder almost certainly survived. We'll know more after those have been recovered and analyzed.
I don’t want this to come across as second guessing a cockpit that I wasn’t in, but speaking generally, recover the aircraft to a flying condition (aviate), if not on a stabilized approach with high certainty of continuing to be (mostly aviate and some navigate), go around and hold at a safe altitude (A&N) while you run the checklists and assess the aircraft state (A) and tell ATC what your intentions are (communicate).
I don’t know what the exact state in that cockpit was, but the video of the aircraft sliding down the runway sans gear at a speed that looked well higher and well longer than normal touchdown suggests that they didn’t have a stabilized approach at the end, whether for good or bad reasons is something for the investigators to figure out.
the airplane is perfectly fine to continue flying for a while on one engine so their momentary shock should not have been an issue. they've trained extensively for this kind of scenario and should probably have gone around if the bird strike happened on final approach. like the other person said... the voice recorder almost certainly survived and will give more information as to the root cause.
It may have been both engines out and there was not enough time to turn on the APU for landing gear deployment. The belly landing was executed just fine but tragically it was the wall at the end of the runway.
it wasn't the wall that got them actually it was the poorly designed ILS embankment that should have been ground level. but yeah you're right it is somewhat probable that it was two engines out as the evidence comes in
Makes Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Stiles look really good, doesn't it.
Back in the day, there was a third crew member who was primarily tasked with navigation and monitoring systems.
Airlines decided it would be cheaper to cut that position and here we are.
> Airlines decided it would be cheaper to cut that position and here we are.
It's not that easy tbh - the advent of digital monitoring systems, fly-by-wire and glass cockpits plainly eliminated the need for it.
On the other hand EASA is pushing for research into single-pilot operations [1]... now that is nuts.
[1] https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/research-projects/emco-sipo-ex...
Aviation is still much safer than back in the days where 3 or even 4 crew in the flight deck were standard. At some point the tradeoff between increased safety and increasing costs becomes unreasonable.
Manufacturers made planes that didn't need it, making their plane's TOC more attractive.
"here we are."
Here where precisely? Civil aviation is extremely safe in 2024, and this crash made worldwide news precisely because crashes are now very rare in the developed world.
If you demand 100 per cent safety, you are bound to be disappointed forever. Not even walking is 100 per cent safe.
Isn’t the point of rigorous pilot training and selection to pick out those who will not be ‘cognitively overloaded’ by a dozen or two alarms at the same time, even under great stress?
Every single person's mind is going to become overloaded at a certain stress & task complexity threshold. Establishing where exactly that point is for a given person is difficult/impossible - e.g. throwing pilots into genuine life-threatening situations to test their responses doesn't seem ethical.
Of course you don’t set the bar at that exact threshold, you set it higher so even after accounting for difficulties of assessment there would still be a comfortable margin.
Not every country/airline has "rigorous pilot training and selection" -- US airlines require around 5x the number of flight hours as non-US. There are, generally, not enough pilots.
Flight hours are not a good metric, experience does not imply skill.
See:
Flight hours are increasingly useless. The planes fly themselves enough that there are serious problems when something goes wrong and situational awareness is lacking.
How is this relevant when the country, South Korea, is known?
It’s not a mystery where these pilots were licensed.
It is relevant that the US requires ~6x more flight hours for airline hiring than South Korea, and the accident happened in South Korea, no?
Can you link the source for the flight hour difference?
If true it does have some signal but it’s not entirely persuasive. After all there clearly are midwit pilots too with a lot of flight hours, who just manage to scrape by on each step of the way.
Edit: Who may very well perform worse in extremus than a less experienced genius pilot.
The US FAA has required 1500 flight hours to receive an ATP (airline pilot) certificate since 2010: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
South Korea requires 250 hours as a country (6x), and Jeju Air specifically requires 300 (5x): https://epicflightacademy.com/hiring-requirements-jeju-air/#...)
Are you taking that number out of your arsenal or from a source? AFAIK most South Korean pilots are actually doing their training in the US, since it's much easier to accumulate the hours, and there's more GA. I would think their training is about the same as US pilots.
Although the US airways system is much more developed and used than Korea's, given that Korea is a smaller country and has an extensive bullet-train network. So I could buy an argument where US pilots just fly more.
Most flights in Korea are international flights, so a pilot for Korean air probably flies as much as a pilot in the states. If the airlines need fewer flights, they could just go with fewer pilots rather than the same number of pilots flying less.
In the 1990s Korea and Taiwan had issues with accidents caused by military pilots without modern crew management cultures (“never question the captain”, which is a big no in modern commercial aviation), so they went with more career pilots trained from scratch (at American schools) rather than just transitioning military pilots into the role.
You should probably apologize for the suggestion that I am making up numbers.
The US FAA has required 1500 flight hours to receive an ATP (airline pilot) certificate since 2010: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-D...
South Korea requires 250 hours as a country (6x), and Jeju Air specifically requires 300 (5x): https://epicflightacademy.com/hiring-requirements-jeju-air/#...)
Oh sure, I do apologize, just wanted to know if the numbers came from somewhere or if they were a wild guess. Thanks for bringing up the references.
The difference is drastic indeed. I almost would qualify for Jeju Air.
> quite rare
This right here is literally a super rare incident — hull loss + everyone-2 killed.
Having read quite a few Admiral Cloudberg[1] posts, task saturation seems fairly common among fatal incidents IIRC.
It has happened before due to another higher priority warning suppressing the "too low, gear" warning, so if there's a lot going on already including other warnings, it's not inconceivable that it was overlooked and the plane didn't issue a warning depending on the circumstances.
> It’s plausible that the pilot would forget, but both of them forgetting and never noticing
Not drawing premature conclusions here without evidence, but Asian airlines and aviation culture have a documented history of the co-pilot not questioning fatal actions by the captain in order to save face.
I know someone who had a no gear low-approach and prop strike, pulled up, got the gear down, and landed straight ahead. Not sure what to call that one, but I bet that pilot won’t do it again.
I want to agree but it has happened before, and with the stress of some other failure it’s not going to be impossible…but it should be super rare.
It’s definitely not impossible. Pilots can get fixated. “That noise is so annoying! Never mind, gotta finish this landing.” It’s rare enough that I think it’s not the way to bet here, and there was probably another problem. But we’ll have to wait for more info to know for sure.
Seems quasi-impossible on a commercial airliner. This thing is going to beep and alert like hell about the landing gears being up. The most likely cause is a complex series of event that led to the landing gears not coming down. Landing gears have multiple redundancies so this is predictably going to be an unfortunately very informative investigation for the aviation sector.
It has happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_International_Airline...
If your engine had a bird strike than the system is already beeping and alerting like hell.
The more likely scenario to me is that they attempted a go-around after the bird strike and failed, leading them to land with gears up, no flaps, at high speed.
If the plane can tell it's super low the ground -- low enough to sound an alarm for it -- and that's a common mistake... why not just have the plane automatically deploy the landing gear?
Doing so complicates other hairy scenarios because of the increased hydraulic/power demands, reduced clearance, increased drag on the plane, worse handling, and the fact that in some emergencies you want a gear-up landing and would expect pilots to simply make the opposite error (forgetting about the gear being automatically deployed) some fraction of the time.
Hmm. Are those situations more likely than forgetting to put the gear down? (Serious question -- I don't know the answer, and I'm curious.)
You do not want auto gear down. There are situations where having the gear down might makes much much worse and you might not be able to be in a situation where you can bring them back up.
I think so, and they're definitely more severe. Gear-up landings occur in something like 1/150k flights, and they're rarely fatal. Stalls happen in roughly 1/100k, near-stalls more frequently, and if unrecovered then they are almost always fatal.
The one plane I know of with auto-retracting gear had a fatal stall because of the feature, so it's not exactly a theoretical argument, but there haven't been a lot of empirical studies.
You're talking about GA flights, not commercial ones, right? I do not believe that a gear-up landing occurs once a day on average in commercial airliners.
this is why there are 2 pilots? doesn't add up
More pilots doesn't necessarily help..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1951
Not an aviation expert or enthusiast, but I'd imagine in a commercial airliner if the gear was not deployed and the pilot was trying to land, at a certain point the plane would start yelling at the crew something like "NO GEAR" "NO GEAR" "NO GEAR (deployed)"
So I don't think a pilot can just "forget" to deploy the landing gear in a commercial airliner.
Youtube is full of examples pilots landing gear up, with the gear-up warning system clearly blaring in the background.
https://youtu.be/5McECUtM8fw?si=DwasT3T_9vHxLczn
This does not only happen to little propeller airplanes. Heres an Airbus A320 where the pilot managed to land gear up despite the presence of all kinds of safeguards and automation.
https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/pia-a320-crews-fatal-lan...
Humans are funny animals.
It sounds like there was an engine out due to a bird strike. The pilot might not have noticed the gear alarm because of the engine alarm.
I think the 777 landing gear warning is based on flap position, eg flaps 0 you won't get a warning, but you will probably get a GPWS configuration warning instead!
> I think the 777 landing gear warning is based on flap position
It isn't. If you're within a thousand feet of terrain, a runway is nearby, and you're at an approach for landing speed, it blares "TOO LOW, GEAR" in the cockpit over and over again. If you're going faster than approach for landing speed or there is no runway, it instead blares "TOO LOW, TERRAIN".
Likewise if you deploy more than flaps 20 without the gear extended (regardless of your height above terrain or the presence of any runway), you get a master warning and "CONFIG GEAR" in red on the EICAS.
TOO LOW GEAR
> although I'm not an aviation expert
In this case, you need to be an aviation and an avian expert.
> Some people think the pilot "forgot" to deploy the landing gear - which seems very unrealistic too.
No, it happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_International_Airli...
With the engine issue 1km out, seems plausible the pilot forgot while dealing with that issue.
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It's SK. Pilots are just ex air force guys, all Korean ethnicity
Looking at google maps it’s not really clear why having a wall at the end of your runway is necessary.
But 9100’ isn’t super short.
Two possibilities come to mind. The first is that it's South Korea so airports are military assets that need to be secure. The other is that it's meant to protect the road and hotel south of the end of the runway from aircraft overshooting the end but that was intended for much lower speed collisions.
Looks like back and front landing gear are not deployed. Highly unlikely for that to happen due to a bird hit.
Agreed. Landing gears can be gravity-operated when hydraulics are out.
People survived that? Looks like a giant ball of fire engulphed the entire plane as it smacked into a wall going 100+ mph.
Two people survived it (or at least, they have survived it so far) by being at the tail of the plane as it separated on impact and avoided the fireball, I imagine.
The AP article[0] list the survivors as crew members(flight attendants). By looking at the main pic in the article with only the tail section as looking anything like it was once a plane, I am guessing they were saved from the brunt of it by the back galley wall
> "Emergency workers pulled out two people, both crew members, to safety, and local health officials said they remain conscious."
[0] https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-plane-fire-68da9b0bd5...
nypost article i saw said two people confirmed alive
In this video of the plane going along the runway, it just seems to me it's going very fast well into a no-gear landing. Like they didn't set it down for more than half the runway (and the runway was 9200 feet)
https://x.com/BNONews/status/1873174704720425440
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muan_International_Airport
The thrust reversers are open though? (maybe?)
They probably started trying to go-around (accelerating) the moment they realized they'd landed half way down the runway with the gear up.
> The plane appears to have hit a concrete wall, according to the photos.
Can anybody point out why there is a concrete wall at the end of the runway?
There isn’t one. There is a dip, and then a marshy area, and then there is a soil berm that supports the runway lighting system which is at the same height as the runway surface.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1108904845802471515...
I’d like to know if his runway had an EMAS system, and if EMAS is effective against an aircraft without the landing gear down. In satellite photos, both ends of the runway are marked with yellow chevrons, which indicates that the surface is not supposed to be taxiied on, and it has a blocky/pixelated coloring which is typical of EMAS but I cant find an airport facility directory that covers MXW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_...
FYI the Discord image link will expire after a few hours. If you could link the original source or reupload the image onto another image host such as Imgur, that'd be nice for people reading the thread later
So let it be written, so let it be done. Sorry, too late to edit my original post, and the original was a webp that imgur won’t take so I had to screenshot it.
Runway info: [1]. No mention of EMAS. There are chevrons at each end, but EMAS markings are not yet standardized internationally, which ops.group complains about.
At that speed, with gear up, and possibly still under power, EMAS might not help much. Unclear from the video.
Expect more solid info tomorrow.
[1] http://aim.koca.go.kr/eaipPub/Package/2015-01-07-AIRAC/html/...
All media seems to say that it is indeed made of concrete. Perhaps covered in soil?
By looking at the streetview image [1], and assuming this is the correct concrete wall they hit, my best guess is that this is just the "fencing" around the airport. Letting an airplane run past the wall would have meant allowing an airplane to cross a few streets past the end of the runway.
It would be nice to know what are the regulations around this topic though, having a concrete wall at the end of a runway can definitely be fatal (as we've seen here)
It looks like a trolley problem to me sadly. If that wall wasn't there, the plane would have kept skidding (from the looks of that picture) downhill into traffic for who knows how long. Planes have a lot of inertia. And those look like power lines just past that wall too; those would not help the situation either.
Here’s a better streetview link. You can see the dirt berm that the aircraft hit is located far inside the perimeter wall. Also the wall is pretty dang thin and would not have stopped a 737 like that.
New pics in the media seem to show most of the wreckage came to a stop between the dirt berm and the perimeter concrete wall. At least one of the engines looks like it reached and penetrated the wall.
If the video we all are seeing is from this accident, then it is not the fencing around the airport. It is some kind of mound, apparently hardened earth with antennas from the instrument landing system on it ( the fence seems to be further back ).
Seems like a matter of “fatal for the airplane passengers” vs. “fatal for the airplane passengers plus motorists”
Could be worse. There was an accident in Brazil a while ago in which a runaway plane almost hit a gas station.
This happened in Argentina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPA_Flight_3142
I was curious so I went and looked at what other airports do, yyz, jfk, icn, lhr are all chainlink, some areas of yyz if you over-ran and went through he chainlink, it looks like surely you'd be on a road considerably bigger than the one at Muan.
Because it's the start of the runway, not the end.
Better for planes to hit a concrete wall than take out a neighborhood downstream from the runway.
Unfotunately the neighbourhood downstream from the runway is a field followed closely by a body of water.
Birdstrike #2 engine possibly captured on video:
Bird concentration chart for the airport, as published by the Korea Office of Civil Aviation. Really not sure what they would expect a pilot do with this information. Also not really sure how they convince the birds to stay in the marked areas.
http://aim.koca.go.kr/eaipPub/Package/2022-06-30/pdf/AD/RKJB...
I like Delhi's solution. They shoot cannons (unclear what's in them) all day to keep the birds away from the runway. This is probably super common, I just haven't seen it done elsewhere.
It’s pretty common, cannons or guns shooting blanks.
My son actually has a temporary gig for the next 3 months at a major U.S. airport where he’s tasked with flying a drone to scare birds away as needed.
I have to give him props, that is a pretty cool gig!
He probably already has props, but I'm sure he can use some extras
I remember airports having birds of prey that they would keep around and deploy for this purpose. Drones are probably much cheaper.
They shoot blank rounds. The noise is what chases birds away, and you don't want any stray projectiles flying about in an airport.
Uh, no. That would be WAY too expensive and difficult to automate. They run off of propane. Search your favorite engine for “bird scare cannon”. Or buy this one off amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/SlavicBeauty-Wildlife-Propane-Scarecr...
Not sure what they use in Delhi, but here in Korea we actually have rangers who shoot blank rounds at birds to chase them away at airports.
See first photo in https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20230307131700056 (article in Korean)
The machine in the second photo looks like a cannon but actually sprays insecticide. The goal is to remove insects that the birds feed on, giving them less reason to approach the area in the first place.
Due to the proximity of most Korean airports to residential areas and important military targets, an automated cannon that makes explosive sounds at random would be a big no-no. People would think the airport was being bombarded, or more likely, the President had declared martial law again :(
I live less than a km from a small airport in South Korea, and hear that "cannon" going off all the time. Now I'm curious, is it propane or a person? I'm going to be on the lookout now.
That only addresses birds on or very near the airport property, and at very low altitudes. It’s not particularly effective, because the birds just move somewhere close by and settle down. It can also be counterproductive, because scaring birds generally causes them to fly. In the air. Where the airplanes are.
Quite a bit of links, information, and speculation on r/aviation
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1holbp4/jeju_air_...
For those preferring old: <https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1holbp4/jeju_air_...>
If you want to always use old.reddit and not have to rely on being logged in: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
Useful, yes, though not universally so.
Some guy's notes from that thread (fft82): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IYwcfDV2gQ4KW7zfi_sAiowu...
Wow, that is indeed quite strange - that’s a very high speed for having scraped along a 9000 foot runway.
They either landed extremely long or it rhymes a bit with the Pakistani Airlines accident of an attempted gear-up landing go around a couple of years back, both not implausible in the context of already dealing with a bird strike. There are also edge cases where the plane won’t yell Landing Gear at you, and it‘s really really hard to get a 737 to a point where you can’t lower the gear anymore (multiple hydraulic systems failing, gravity pins and pulleys as well, Stig Aviation did a great video on that.)
Pretty sure there was no EMAS, as the plane dips down into the dirt at the end of the runway right away, ie not that much lift, and EMAS would do orders of magnitude more arresting.
I’m leaning toward no EMAS. I found a facility directory that lists the size of the runway-end safety area where EMAS would be but it has no description of any EMAS system.
https://aim.koca.go.kr/eaipPub/Package/2022-09-07-AIRAC/html...
I’m not sure EMAS would have helped though. I believe EMAS relies on the weight of the aircraft bearing on the relatively small contact area of the tires/wheels to punch thru the unreinforced concrete. The weight of the aircraft distributed across the area of the belly may not be sufficient to break through the surface.
Plane was likely going too fast for EMAS to be effective.
And apparently EMAS require gears down to be effective.
I’d be very curious to know where the survivors were seated on the plane.
It’s a miracle anyone survived.
Likely at the very back, which is nominally the safest place to be on a plane.
Note that the survivors of the Russian shoot-down of the Embraer 190 were all in the tail section. Nominally, of course, as here have been accidents where the tail struck first and that is where there were more injuries or fatalities.
Apparently the two survivors were crew sitting in the back, so they also had the rear facing seats crew use.
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That’s a terrible thing to say.
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You can use the word “miracle” without ascribing any metaphysical meaning. It obviously just means “an incredibly unlikely event” in this instance.
An informed take on what may or may not have happended:
https://youtu.be/w1r8dl4RqMw?si=BzEnCzbgv7oYNNwe
Only one engine was in reverse, and flaps were not down. The YT video also excerpts manuals and diagrams to good effect for a lay person who is not a pilot. Video of engine failing near airport may have been bird strike. They were in flight 4+ hours, so fuel should have been used to an extent, but don't they dump fuel when they are going to land in an emergency like this? The fireball was big, and they should have shut fuel pumps before flare up of reversing engines on runway.
The 1-foot-thick concrete wall for the atenna array seems to have caused it to impact hard enough to cause the most damage and fireball. The video points out there are lots of these with less robust structures at most airports.
737 NG does not have fuel dump capability. Its hard to use the thrust reverser if the fuel pumps are off.
Interesting. How does bird strike on one engine shut down all systems? Aren't there a left/right engine system and an auxillary? The same video was updated today, and he conjectured it may have been they shut the wrong engine down like in a previous Taiwan air incident. They only had 5 min. to do anything according to the timeline.
A bird strike doesn't. From the external video, none of this makes sense. The hydraulics are triple redundant and independent of each other. Even without both engines to run pumps or generators, you can drop the gear via gravity and use either leftover hydraulic pressure to drop flaps or the use electrical backup, which should work on battery or APU.
You can hear at least one engine running before it touches the ground AND you can see that the plane is at least in somewhat in control, considering it lines up with the runway properly and does a flare AND a thrust reverser is active before it hits the ground.
The control surfaces work without power (with great effort) since they are mechanically linked in the case of emergency on the 737 NG. If the gears were down, it should have triggered automatic flaps to slow the plane down on touchdown.
None of this makes sense, unless we assume the pilots royally fucked up basically everything. They missed the optimal landing point and only used about 40% of the runway traveling at what appears to be at least 80 knots above the normal max landing speed.
Give this a day to settle. There's a lot of misinformation out there.
NYT: "Its landing gear appeared not to have dropped down from under the plane, and the flaps on its wings apparently were not activated for landing, Mr. Tonkin added. “The aircraft was essentially in a flying configuration,” he said. That meant the plane was likely “flying faster than it would normally be in a landing situation.”"
That's consistent with the video. The aircraft is sliding down the runway, lined up with the runway, going too fast, wheels up, flaps up, possibly still under power.
"Why" is days away.
I'm not competent to judge, but from what I read on another website, two additional elements [1]. On the video of the bird strike flaps were deployed, but during the crash they weren't. The plane did a 180º and landed on a different runway than it was initially approaching (tailwind, making it worse).
This suggests (this is only speculation) a scenario akin to: normal approach for landing -> brid strike -> go around (retract flaps and full power on the remaining engine) -> loss of power on the second engine (so no more hydraulic power, and no power to climb) -> attempt to land in very unfavorable conditions.
As you say, give it a couple at least a day if not more to settle.
[1] airliners.net
Can’t speak for Jeju, but at United flaps 5 is the go-around flap configuration. Never heard of flaps zero on a 737 for a go-around.
Still too little good info. Many bogus statements in news articles.
- "Skidded off the runway" - no, the aircraft landed straight, gear up, and too fast, and stayed on the runway to the end.
- "Hydraulic failure" - don't know that yet.
- "Shut off good engine" - then why so much engine noise in video?
The flight recorders have been recovered but are damaged. They can still be read, but not just by plugging in a cable as normal.
Given that The Guardian reported they attempted landing and then took off again before the fatal landing happened, meaning they had control and power, and that the airport sits on a peninsula I wonder why not to attempt landing on water. Perhaps sea was rough.
I don’t think water is preferable to a runway, gear or not. Both will be very hard surfaces indeed at the right speed, and water has additional hazards that more than make up for the fact it has more space.
The same plane was in the news a couple of days earlier. Not a technical issue but medical emergency, probably coincidence https://www.ekn.kr/web/view.php?key=20241228028449548
The extended footage shows that the plane was not slowing down much.
No landing gears = no brakes.
There are a few other ways to stop a plane, but none are as effective as applying brakes to the wheels.
The thrust reverser might not have been operational due to earlier bird strike.
There are speculations that the pilot might have been trying to extend the flaps and increase the angle of attack in a last-ditch effort to slow the plane, resulting in a surprisingly stable nose-up attitude as the plane skidded along the runway. (This is not an easy thing to maintain. Most planes landing on their bellies will skid sideways or roll over before long.) In any case, this could be a misinterpretation as the pilot could also have been trying to execute a go-around.
CNN initially reported 170, then changed it to 47 and now reports 170 again. I was hoping the 170 was a mistaken report
(Essentially no discussion in the other thread.)
Is there a reason why a runway landing was preferred over a water landing?
We don’t know if the pilots were aware of emergency yet. It’s plausible they erroneously thought landing gear was down and attempted a fatal go-around once the airframe hit the runway. The SOP for broken landing gear is to land on the runway anyway because you have immediate access to emergency services.
Runway landing is always preferred over a water landing.
Even though almost everyone died? I would disagree pretty strongly that runway was preferred than water landing.
Landing in the ocean is not the same as landing on the hudson river. Not only would the plane have still likely broken up and caught on fire, but rescue crews would have been even further away.
Something went horribly wrong on that plane and in that cockpit. Emergency services didn't even have a chance to prep the runway.
because water is a hard surface at landing speeds and the plane often breaks apart at contact. if you manage to land in one piece, you have limited time before plane starts submerging.
Given the fact that the runway landing resulted in 99% dead I feel like the water landing was by far the better option.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Without knowing how things will turn out, it seems reasonable that it would be safer to land on the runway without landing gear, even if water is available. Certainly in some cases it might turn out that a water landing would have been the better option, but you might not know that until it's too late.
they didn't try to land it seems. trying to land was the better option.
Is flying getting less safe, or are incidents just getting more attention?
Flying commercially has been getting dramatically safer over time:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/aviation-fatalities-per-m...
The numbers aren't in for the current year yet, but they will likely be just a little bit worse than 2019, placing this year in the top 5 on record for safety (all of which have been in the past decade).
I know it's technically safer to be in an airplane than a car, but for some reason the helplessness of being inside a plane always gets to me.
This idea of being in a metal barrel thrown at 900kmh relying on a hundred years of fuck-around-&-find-out at the mercy of a pilot who I do not know "but trust me". Yeesh.
Still, statistically, undeniably, the safest way to move people.
So safe that it’s getting hard to quantify in places. The last airline passenger fatality in the US was almost seven years ago. Compare with an average of well over 100 per day on the roads. There’s a lot more driving, but only by a factor of ~10.
> at the mercy of a pilot who I do not know "but trust me"
Well, I trust a professionally trained commercial airline pilot more than a random Uber driver any day. Literally been on cars where driver is watching TikTok while driving, among other dangerous behavior.
> technically safer to be in an airplane than a car
Safer per mile. I doubt it’s safer per hour.
No definitely safer per hour. "In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was . 003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles." [1] Adjusting for a speed difference of 10x it's 0.03 for planes and 0.57 for cars. Which makes sense - it's pretty easy to crash a car, and much harder to crash a plane (there's not much to crash into in the air).
1. https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/
Huh, interesting.
I don’t think so, but if they broadcast all horrific car crashes daily, people may really get spooked
...makes me wonder if we should do that. would it lead to safer driving?
Aviation is safe largely because of training and adherence to procedure. I'm not sure about elsewhere in the world but the US population of drivers seems largely immune to both of these things for driving a car.
A lot of people see driving a car as a right, instead of a privilege it is (or should be). It goes hand in hand with little required training and lenient punishments.
The dangerous parts of flying are landing and take off. Everything else is safe.
This is not the case near Russian airspace.
That's why SFO to Delhi is routed more towards the eastern part of Russia after the war.
Flying can become safer WHILE also having more number of accidents, by just having more people fly now than ever.
Variance sometimes comes in groups.
No and yes.
What does the QRH say to do in this circumstance?
bird strikes dont prevent you from deploying a landing gear
Why didn't they land on water?!
Runway is always preferable.
Unless the water ditch would have killed everyone, that’s not immediately clear.
Had they known what was going to happen they’d likely have chosen some other option.
Unless the water is very calm it's quite possible to break up and lose the plane and passengers on a water landing as well.
Sure, in hindsight we'll always wish we can go back and choose another option if the one we did choose ends up going poorly.
Expectation in a water ditch is the plane breaks up and everyone either dies on impact or dies of hypothermia or drowns.
> Had they known what was going to happen they’d likely have chosen some other option.
Yeah, absolutely.
https://www.hankookilbo.com/News/Read/A2024122913460001941?_...
Translation from Korean…
>Article
>The Korea Times
>Plane carrying 175 people crashes while landing at Muan Airport
>Reporter Park Kyung-woo
>Passenger KakaoTalk, control tower communication contents, etc. confirmed.
>Engine flames during circling for second landing, fuselage landing attempted at an urgent moment KakaoTalk conversation of a Jeju Air passenger who crashed at Muan Airport. He told an acquaintance that he could not land due to a flock of birds.
>KakaoTalk conversation of a Jeju Air passenger who crashed at Muan Airport. He told an acquaintance that he could not land due to a flock of birds.
>The Jeju Air passenger plane that crashed after straying from the runway while landing at Muan International Airport was confirmed to have collided with a flock of birds while approaching the airport. This caused a fire in the engine, and smoke and toxic gases entered the aircraft, causing the plane to attempt a hasty landing.
>According to a comprehensive report by the Hankook Ilbo on the 29th, the accident passenger plane was scheduled to land at Muan Airport at 8:30 AM that day. However, while approaching the airport while lowering its altitude for landing, a flock of birds struck the right wing and engine at an altitude of 200 meters.
>The passenger plane gave up landing and raised its nose. It seems that they judged that landing would be difficult. The Muan Airport control tower received this report from the captain. The captain then communicated with the control tower that he would attempt a second landing and circled over the airport, but in the meantime, flames broke out in the engine. An official familiar with the communication said, "Despite the sufficient runway length, smoke and toxic gases entered the aircraft, and an emergency landing was made without time to take measures such as draining fuel." "It seems that the engine system deteriorated, so the electronics and hydraulic systems did not work, and that is why the landing gear did not come down."
>In an emergency, the control tower reportedly had a dedicated fire brigade on standby near the runway. An airport official said, "If we had known about the landing gear failure earlier, we could have dumped all the fuel (remaining in the aircraft) and applied a substance to the runway floor that could increase the coefficient of friction and cool the flames. However, time was of the essence."
>During the second landing attempt, the runway approach and landing angle were good, and the captain switched to manual control. An airport official said, "After landing on the runway, we had no choice but to rely on wing (engine) reverse thrust to decelerate," and "Since steering was also impossible, we collided with the outer wall at the end of the runway."
>A KakaoTalk message from a passenger on the accident plane was also confirmed, suggesting a bird strike just before landing. According to the message, at exactly 9 o'clock, a passenger told an acquaintance, "A bird got caught on my wing, so I can't land."
Maybe the end of an airport runway should be some form of elastic plane-load rated material & not essentially a solid wall.
There is such a system available. It’s called EMAS. It’s unclear if it installed at this airport and if this accident was within it’s capabilities, if it was installed. But it did save Mike Pence once. Also A-Rod.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_...
it was installed on 2019 but still question to Lee Kun-Tse (李昆澤) why that concrete high barier was installed even there is a easier way to install antennas which would definitelly prevent from that tragedy? Please have a look on the links below describing that issue:
EMAS is common ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arresto... ), but many airports are built in areas where you’re inherently locked in and there’s a choice of runway, EMAS, grass overrun, but a fixed total distance available.
Not sure what you understand with "common". According to that wiki page, EMAS is installed on 112 runways in the US and there are over 1000 commercial runways in the US (as of 2007: https://www.icao.int/Meetings/AMC/MA/2007/9CCARDCA/9ccardcai...). There are only 15 non-US installations and none of them are in South Korea.
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I've watched enough Air Crash Investigation to be scared of Airbus too
Bird strikes don't discriminate.
I'm waiting for how they're going to blame the AI.
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You simping for a failed perpetrator of a coup now?
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Are you not?
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It’s been a very deadly year for airplane safety?
Whats up with all the plane crashes lately blaming bird hits.
There's no one accountable like Boeing if they can blame it on a random bird.
WTF, why they have to put a wall at the end of the runway? so sad. that is 170 real lives that could have been mostly saved without that fxxking wall.
Don't be outraged at rumors.
Here's the wall in question, apparently (I can't be sure that's correct, of course, link taken from another comment):
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.9756691,126.381087,3a,53.5y,...
Does it look like it can stop a plane to you? No freaking wall would do that.
Most likely it was the uneven terrain that caused the front of the plane to hit a mound and caused the rest to collapse behind it.
It definitely hit this https://maps.app.goo.gl/Npbyqgiy57y7jZDj7 instead.
how about just spend a few minutes listening to an expert? the design of the airport was regarded as 'unbelievably awful'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vjMRCG7Mjg
it is basically a crime endangering public safety.
I would take my chances with the water over a concrete wall
