South Korea orders aviation safety investigation after country’s worst crash kills 179 people
South Korea’s acting President Choi Sang-mok ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire air operations system on Monday as investigators worked to identify victims and figure out what caused the country’s deadliest aviation disaster.
All 175 passengers and four of the six crew died when a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 landed on its belly, skidded off the end of the runway at Muan International Airport and crashed into a wall in a fireball. Two crew members were pulled out alive.
The top priority for now is to identify the victims, support their families and treat the two survivors, Choi said at a disaster management meeting in Seoul.
“Even before the final results are available, we ask officials to transparently disclose the accident investigation process and inform the bereaved immediately,” he said.
“Once the accident recovery is completed, the Ministry of Transportation will be requested to conduct an emergency safety inspection of the entire aircraft operating system to prevent aircraft accidents from recurring,” he said.
As a first step, the Transportation Ministry announced plans to conduct a special inspection of all 101 Boeing 737-800 aircraft of South Korean airlines starting Monday, with a focus on maintenance records of key components.
Jeju Air flight 7C2216, which arrived from the Thai capital Bangkok with 175 passengers and six crew on board, attempted to land at the airport in the south of the country shortly after 9 a.m. local time on Sunday.
Investigators are looking into bird strikes and weather conditions as possible causes of the crash, fire officials said. Experts say many questions remain, including why the plane, powered by two CFM 56-7B26 engines, appeared to be flying so fast and why its landing gear did not appear to be extended as it slid down the runway and into a wall.
CFM International is a joint venture between GE Aerospace and France’s Safran.
On Monday, Transportation Department officials said that as the pilots made a scheduled approach, they notified air traffic control that the plane had suffered a bird strike, and shortly after the control tower alerted them, birds were spotted nearby.
Authorities are investigating the cause of a plane crash at Muan airport in South Korea after the plane skidded the runway and burst into flames, killing at least 179 people on board.
The pilots then issued a mayday warning, signaling their intention to abort the landing, conduct a circuit and try again. Shortly afterwards, the aircraft landed on the runway in a belly landing, touched down approximately 1,200 meters along the 2,800 meter long runway and slid into the embankment at the end of the runway.
Officials are investigating what role the tracking antenna, which is mounted at the end of the runway and helps with landing, played in the crash, including the concrete embankment on which it stood, Transportation Department officials said at a media briefing.
“Normally at an airport with a runway there is no wall at the end,” says Christian Beckert, aviation safety expert and Lufthansa pilot from Munich. “They may have an engineered material capture system that will lower the aircraft a little bit into the ground and slow it down.”
The crash primarily killed local residents returning from vacation in Thailand, and two Thai nationals also died.
On Monday morning, investigators tried to identify some of the last remaining victims as desperate families waited in the Muan airport terminal.
Park Han-shin, who lost his brother in the accident, said authorities told him that his brother had been identified but his body could not be seen.
Park called on the families of other victims to respond together to the disaster and recovery efforts, citing the 2014 ferry sinking that killed more than 300 people. Following this disaster, prolonged efforts were made to identify the victims and the cause of the sinking.
Flight data recorder recovered
Rescue workers searched through wreckage that was almost completely destroyed when the plane was engulfed in an explosion of flames and debris at the regional airport near the country’s winding west coast.
Transportation Department officials said the jet’s flight data recorder had been recovered but appeared to have sustained some external damage and it was not yet clear whether the data was sufficiently intact to be analyzed.
Jeju Air shares hit their lowest level on record on Monday, trading as much as 15.7 percent lower.
Under global aviation regulations, South Korea will conduct a civil investigation into the crash and automatically involve the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the United States, where the plane was designed and built.
The NTSB said it was leading a team of American investigators to assist South Korea’s aviation authority. Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration also participated.
Choi, who oversaw the recovery effort and investigation, became acting leader just three days ago after the country’s president and prime minister were indicted for imposing short-lived martial law.
