On Sunday Dec. 29, the Boeing 737-800 carrying 181 people on Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok to the South Korean regional airport in Muan crashed, killing all but two flight attendants on board. The circumstances of the crash are yet another example of how problems that may not be fatal individually can combine to create a major tragedy.
Following an apparently normal flight from Thailand, on the approach to Muan the pilot was warned of the presence of birds near the runway. According to the Wikipedia article on the accident, during their approach the pilots issued a mayday, apparently due to a bird strike. They were given permission to land in the opposite direction to their initial approach.
On the ground, residents reported hearing loud bangs before the plane landed, and smoke was seen coming from one engine, suggesting that birds may have disabled it.
For reasons yet unknown, the landing gear was not deployed before the pilot attempted a second pass at the runway. The plane landed nose-up and skidded for 1200 meters on the engine nacelles. A video made by a bystander shows the plane traveling toward the end of the runway, apparently intact and not on fire yet.
But 250 meters beyond the end of the runway, the plane encountered the concrete foundation of an instrument-landing-system antenna array. The plane was going fast enough to destroy all of the fuselage except for a small section of the tail, in which the two survivors were found with serious injuries. Everyone else—175 passengers and four crew members—died.
The damaged flight recorder was recovered and is being analyzed in the U. S. for clues as to why so many things went wrong at once. But even at this early stage in the investigation process, a few things are clear.
A bird strike disabling one of the two engines of a 737 is not by itself a fatal occurrence. If the other engine is operating normally, there is enough power and control remaining for a skilled pilot to land the craft and even take off with one engine, given enough runway distance.
A failure of landing gear to deploy, by itself, is also a survivable problem. If ground crews have enough notice to spread foam on the runway and be prepared for a post-landing fire, planes have successfully landed (a "belly landing") without operating landing gear. The feat is very tricky, however, and always damages the plane extensively, and any obstructions on the ground or past the end of the runway can destroy the plane.
And that is exactly what happened when the 737-800, which up to that point had survived the belly landing relatively intact, struck the concrete antenna-array foundation 250 meters beyond the end of the runway. Aviation experts say that barrier should not have been allowed to be erected so close to the flight path. It is an obvious undesirable feature of airport architecture to have a solid substantial structure that won't break away in the possible path of belly-landing aircraft. Some South Korean architectural firm is going to have to answer some hard questions in the near future.
So we see that the accident involved at least three independent, although possibly related, problems: the bird strike or whatever it was that apparently killed an engine, the failure of the landing gear to deploy (whether through mechanical failure or human error), and the placement of a potentially plane-destroying concrete obstruction in the flight path. Eliminating any one of these issues could have resulted in a scary but survivable landing. But all three of them combined to produce the most deadly aircraft accident on South Korean soil in that nation's history.
This accident comes at a supremely fragile point in the political history of South Korea, which is currently being run by an acting president after Yoon Suk Yeol, who was duly elected in May of 2022, declared martial law, was impeached on Dec. 14, 2024, and replaced by Han Duck-soo, who was impeached in turn on Dec. 27, and replaced by Choi Sang-mok. A national tragedy such as the Jeju Air crash would be a blot on even a popular president's record, but coming at this time of instability, it will only add to the general level of tension and anxiety in the country.
Our sympathy extends to the hundreds of relatives, loved ones, and friends who lost passengers at this holiday time. Until the flight recorder is examined, we can't know exactly what was going on in the cockpit during what was clearly an emergency. And in the aftermath of such a tragedy, assigning blame is not going to bring anyone back from the dead, although it might give a sense of closure to some.
South Korea is a fascinating case study of a culture which propelled itself from a rather backwards agriculture-based traditional model to one in which cutting-edge technology fuels a so-far thriving economy. Curiously, though, South Korea has the world's lowest total fertility rate. At 0.78, it is well below the replacement rate of about 2.1 (the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime), and is already having a deleterious effect on the country's economy and social life. Losing family members is always hard, but in a country where marriage and childbearing have become relatively unpopular, a tragedy like this one must make things seem even worse.
We look forward to the results of the investigation into this accident. But already there are lessons to be learned about airport architecture, about emergency landing procedures, and about the damage birds can cause when they fly near airports, as birds are always going to do. The year 2024 ended badly for air safety, with the apparent shooting down of Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 which we covered only last week, and now the Jeju Air crash. Let's hope the lessons from both of these tragedies are learned quickly and applied to make air travel in 2025 even safer than ever.
Sources: I referred to a Reuters article on the Jeju Air crash at https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-extends-boeing-737-800-inspections-following-fatal-crash-2025-01-03/, a CBS News report at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-korea-plane-crash-police-raid-jeju-air/, and the Wikipedia article "Jeju Air Flight 2216."