All but two of the 181 people aboard a passenger plane in South Korea were killed on Sunday morning, in the deadliest global aviation disaster in years.
Days after the Jeju Air crash, there is little explanation about why the plane went down. As investigators try to piece together what happened, video from the scene and early official reports offer clues.
The pilot reported a bird strike at 8:59 a.m. and told air traffic controllers at Muan International Airport that he would abort his landing attempt and circle in the air to prepare for another one. Instead of going all the way around, he approached the runway facing south at high speed.
The plane missed the usual touchdown zone and landed much farther along the runway than normal. It then hurtled down the landing strip on its belly, leaving a trail of smoke.
The pilot appeared unable to control the engines and no landing gear was visible as the plane made contact with the runway — two critical elements in slowing a plane down during landing. The plane also did not appear to have activated its wing flaps, another means of controlling speed.
The plane eventually overshot the runway and crashed into a concrete structure.
At the end of the video, the plane had burst into flames.
The aircraft was on a Boeing 737-800 jet, one of the most common passenger planes in the world. It had taken off from Bangkok with six crew members and 175 passengers, most of whom were South Koreans returning home after a Christmas vacation in Thailand.
Officials recovered the plane’s “black box,” an electronic flight recorder that contains cockpit voice and other flight data that help investigations of aviation crashes.
The device was partly damaged, so it could take time to recover the data, according to experts, but it could prove crucial in determining what happened in the four fateful minutes between when the pilot reported a bird strike and when the plane crashed.
Sources: South Korean transport ministry; satellite image by Maxar Technologies
Aviation analysts are considering several factors that might have contributed to the crash, including the concrete structure near the runway that the airline slammed into before exploding into a fireball.
Similar concrete structures exist in other airports in South Korea and abroad, said Ju Jong-wan, a director of aviation policy at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. It was built according to regulations but the government planned to investigate whether the rules should be revised in the wake of the Jeju Air crash, he said.
Photo by Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
A satellite image captured on Monday showed dozens of vehicles at the site of the wreckage. The work of piecing together hundreds of body parts has been painstaking, but the authorities said that by Tuesday morning, 170 bodies had been identified and four were turned over to their families.
Source: Satellite image by Planet Labs on Dec. 30
The crash was the deadliest worldwide since 2018, according to the United Nations, when Lion Air Flight 610 crashed off the coast of Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.
