TOPSHOT - Police forensics personnel and National Bureau of Investigation officials are seen by a wall as they work at the scene where a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 aircraft crashed and burst into flames at Muan International Airport in Muan, some 288 kilometres southwest of Seoul on December 31, 2024. The Boeing 737-800 was carrying 181 people from Thailand to South Korea when it crashed on arrival on December 29, killing everyone aboard -- save two flight attendants pulled from the twisted wreckage of the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil. - Photo by YONHAP / AFP
SEOUL (Bloomberg): South Korean authorities are investigating airport infrastructure at the site of the country’s worst civil air accident as questions grow over the role played in the disaster by a concrete wall at the end of the runway.
Transport officials said at a briefing Tuesday they would assess whether the concrete structure, which supported an array of antennas used to guide a plane’s landing at Muan International Airport, violated any rules. Earlier, the same officials said the structure - known as a localizer - was placed in accordance with international standards outside the runway’s 199-meter safety area.
The shift of focus to the localizer’s role came as international safety experts questioned if Sunday’s crash, which killed 179 people, was made worse by the positioning of the structure and the fact that it was constructed partly out of concrete. The high impact caused the plane to explode, likely the cause of the fatalities of most people on the Jeju Air Co. plane.
The tragedy involved a Boeing Co. 737-800 aircraft - a predecessor to the Max - operated by Jeju Air. The aircraft went up in flames early Sunday morning after sliding down the runway on its belly and into the wall. The wing flaps and slats didn’t appear to be extended when the plane landed, which would have slowed it down, and the landing gear wasn’t deployed.
But one of the biggest questions, according to safety experts, is why the concrete-topped mound was placed at the end of the runway. Other countries, like the US, Canada and European nations, use the same types of antennas but they’re designed to break easily to avoid this kind of scenario, the experts said. It’s also rare for the equipment to be located on top of a mound.
"There’s no reason to put them on concrete,” said Captain John Cox, the president and chief executive officer of Safety Operating Systems LLC. "The severity of this incident would have been dramatically different had that concrete barrier not been there.”
South Korea’s regulations dictate any facilities or equipment in the runway safety zone should be made of easily breakable materials to minimize the danger to planes. But the rules do not apply to the antenna structure at Muan airport as it was outside the safety area.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigation chief for the US Federal Aviation Administration, also questioned why such a rigid structure was used to house the antenna array and said the airport’s standards would likely get a close look by investigators.
Guzzetti and Cox also suspected that both of the low-cost carrier plane’s engines might have failed prior to landing, given that the wing flaps and landing gear weren’t extended, indicating the aircraft had lost all power. It’s possible both were struck by birds or even that one was severely damaged and then the flight crew mistakenly shut down the second one, both said.
Emergency Landings
There have been other incidents where planes have landed on their bellies that haven’t resulted in fatalities or very few, including the "Miracle on the Hudson” in 2009 where a US Airways flight landed in the Hudson River after the plane was struck by a flock of geese that knocked out both engines. Pilots of an aircraft operated by Piedmont Airlines in 1989 were able to land safely in Greensboro, North Carolina after the main landing gear jammed. Neither incident resulted in any fatalities.
A Garuda Indonesia flight made a controlled landing in a river in 2002 after both engines flamed out in the middle of a severe thunderstorm, resulting in one death.
Authorities in South Korea are working on the two black boxes, or flight recorders, from the aircraft which will shed more light on the final moments before the plane crashed. The flight data recorder, which tracks aircraft parameters such as altitude and airspeed, is missing a critical component, authorities revealed Tuesday, potentially delaying the investigation.
Korean investigators are also getting assistance from a team from the US led by the National Transportation Safety Board.
"It’s early,” Cox said. "Let’s get the two recorder readouts. That will tell the story of the flight.”
--With assistance from Danny Lee. -- ©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
