A passenger plane carrying 181 people crash-landed on its belly on Sunday at an airport in South Korea, hitting a barrier and exploding into an orange fireball in the worst aviation disaster in the country in almost three decades.
Most of the people on board the plane, a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air, were killed, officials said.
The plane, Flight 7C2216, had taken off from Bangkok and was landing at Muan International Airport in South Korea’s southwest when it crashed around 9 a.m. local time. Officials said the plane had broken into so many pieces that only its tail was identifiable.
The plane was carrying 175 passengers and six crew members. As of Sunday evening, the official death toll had risen to 177, according to the National Fire Agency. Two crew members had been rescued from the aircraft’s tail section, and emergency workers continued searching the wreckage.
What caused the crash?
Officials were investigating why the landing gear appeared to have malfunctioned, and whether birds had struck the plane or if bad weather had been a factor, Ju Jong-wan, a director of aviation policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, said at a news briefing.
As the plane was landing, he said, the airport warned it about a potential bird strike. The plane issued a mayday alert shortly after, he said, then crash-landed.
The muddy tidal flats near Muan International Airport and much of the west coast of the Korean Peninsula are favorite resting places for migrant birds. Photographs in local media showed flocks of birds flying near the airport on Sunday.
Footage broadcast by MBC-TV showed one of the engines briefly emitting flames as it neared the airport.
Kim E-bae, the chief executive of Jeju Air, said at a news conference that the plane had no history of accidents, and also had no problems during routine maintenance checks.
The plane’s landing gear appeared not to have dropped down from underneath, and the flaps on its wings apparently were not activated for landing, said Keith Tonkin, the managing director of Aviation Projects, an aviation consulting company in Brisbane, Australia, who reviewed video of the crash.
“The aircraft was essentially in a flying configuration,” he said. That meant the plane was most likely “flying faster than it would normally be in a landing situation.”
Crashes are often caused by multiple factors, which can take years to uncover through in-depth investigations.
This was South Korea’s worst passenger plane crash in decades.
Sunday’s crash was the worst aviation accident involving a South Korean airline since a Korean Air jet slammed into a hill in Guam, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific, in 1997. That crash killed 229 of the 254 people onboard.
It also appeared to have been the first fatal crash for Jeju Air, a low-cost South Korean carrier that was established in 2005 and flies to dozens of countries in Asia.
Two days earlier, the plane involved in the crash had been flying to Beijing from Jeju, a Korean island south of the mainland, when it had to divert to Seoul, according to the flight tracking site Flightradar24. The diversion was caused by a medical, not technical, emergency onboard, according to the Incheon International Airport Police Corps.
After that, the plane flew 10 flights between South Korea, Malaysia, Japan, China, Taiwan and Thailand without incident, according to Flightradar24, before Sunday morning’s crash.
In 2021, the South Korean authorities investigated Jeju Air after one of its planes flew despite having a defect, according to reports in the domestic news media. A tip of one of its wings was damaged during a landing, but the crew failed to notice the damage and the plane took off again, The Korea Herald reported.
Last year, the airline received a safety grade of A, or “very good,” from the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport’s annual review of domestic airlines. The score is based on the number of accidents or near accidents. The highest grade any airline got that year was A++, and the lowest was B+.
The Boeing 737-800 has a strong safety record.
The Jeju Air plane that crashed was a Boeing 737-800, a model that is used widely around the world and is a staple of low-cost airlines. There are about 4,400 Boeing 737-800s in service globally, according to Cirium, an aviation data provider. That’s about 15 percent of the passenger planes operating globally.
“The plane in question is very safe and has a good safety record,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California who has studied the safety history of the Boeing 737 line.
It was possible that the plane’s landing gear did not deploy because of a “maintenance” problem, he said, though he said he would not rule out a bird strike as a cause.
Mr. Meshkati said that the Boeing 737-800’s landing gear was well designed and had a history of reliability.
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