Aviation experts said on Sunday that the deadliest crash on South Korean soil has been engulfed by uncertainties and and were skeptical about the reasoning that a bird strike might have brought down the plane, reported Reuters on Dec 29.
Jeju Air’s Boeing 737-800 aircraft was seen in video broadcast on local media skidding down the runway at around 9:03am with no visible landing gear before slamming into a wall, killing 179 of the 181 people on board. Only two people, both flight crew members, were rescued from the crash.
Under global aviation rules, South Korea will lead a civil investigation into the crash and will include the US National Transportation Safety Board in the investigative team as the plane was designed and built in America.
The flight data recorder was found at 11:30am local time, about two and a half hours after the crash, and the cockpit voice recorder was found at 2:24pm, according to South Korea’s transport ministry.
“That gives you all the parameters of all the systems of the plane. The heartbeat of the airplane is on the flight data recorder,” said an aviation expert, noting that the voice recorder will probably provide the most interesting analysis of what transpired in the final moments going into the crash.
Experts caution that air accidents are usually caused by a cocktail of factors and it can take months to piece together the sequence of events in and outside the plane, suggesting that it seemed unlikely a bird strike would have caused the landing gear to malfunction.
The captain of the ill-fated Jeju Air flight had worked at that rank since 2019 and had logged 6,823 flight hours, the ministry said. The first officer had worked at that rank since 2023 and had logged approximately 1,650 flight hours.
The Boeing model involved in the crash is one of the world’s most flown airliners with a generally strong safety record and was developed well before the MAX variant involved in a recent Boeing safety crisis.
South Korea’s acting President Choi Sang-mok arrived at the scene of the deadliest air disaster of the country on Sunday, after being on the job for merely two days. Choi, the country’s finance minister, became acting President on Friday night.
He visited the site a few hours after the crash and declared it a special disaster zone.
“The government would like to offer its sincere condolences to the bereaved families and will do its best to recover from this accident and prevent a recurrence,” he said.
In a separate report, AFP said the country has declared a seven day national mourning period effective from Sunday, with memorial altars to be set up nationwide.
“Of the 179 dead, 65 have been identified,” the country’s fire agency said, adding that DNA retrieval had begun.
Inside the airport terminal, tearful family members gathered to wait for news.
An official began calling out the names of the 65 victims who had been identified, with each name triggering fresh cries of grief from waiting relatives.
