Late on Saturday, December 28th, 2024 news broke of a South Korean airliner crash, Jeju 2216 from Bangkok to Muan. A pilot submits his thoughts.
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This is a breaking news story and not all information can be considered valid nor corroborated. Rather than exclude potential information, its inclusion here should be accepted as a possibility rather than conclusive evidence. This post may be updated as new information unfolds, submitted at 4 AM, December 29th, 2024.
***CNN has reported Air Traffic Control adjusted runway approach due to birds in the area and the pilots complied. Jeju 2216 pilots declared “Mayday” two minutes prior to landing.***
What We Know Now
At 23:58 UTC, Jeju 2216 ceased transmitting via ADS-B on final approach to Muan, South Korea runway 1. The flight had departed from Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport some four hours prior. The 737-800 was originally delivered to Ryan Air in 2009 and flew with the carrier until 2016, it was acquired by Jeju in 2017. The video shows the aircraft careening down the runway at a high rate of speed with no landing gear down before running into a barrier at the end of the runway and bursting into flames. There were some survivors but the number has fluctuated greatly to the extent that it’s hard to put a number on it.
Here’s the video:
BREAKING: Video shows crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 in South Korea. 181 people on board pic.twitter.com/9rQUC0Yxt8
— BNO News (@BNONews) December 29, 2024
Some key observations:
- The aircraft is at the final quarter of a 9,186′ runway
- It’s moving at a high rate of speed
- The flaps and slats are retracted or at least not in a landing setting
- Reverse thrust is engaged on the starboard engine but from :03 seconds into the video the port side reverse thrust does not appear engaged
- The aircraft is in a nose-up attitude
Another video emerged purportedly of the same aircraft encountering an engine issue prior to arrival either by bird strike or a compressor issue. It’s not confirmed that this is the same airframe.
Video of Jeju Air Flight 2216 shortly before crashing. A explosion can be seen in one of the engines.
byu/DateRoutine7869 inaviation
Observations From A Pilot
I spoke with our resident commercial airline pilot, 121Pilot, and we discussed the two possible videos. Here was his response:
“My thoughts after watching the videos and and reading the news reports to date.
This wasn’t a planned gear up landing. You don’t have any emergency equipment standing by and no reporting the crew declared an emergency.
The runway at Muan is just under 9,200’ which is more than long enough for the airplane if it touches down in the touchdown zone to slide to a stop. But in the video we see the airplane almost at the end of the runway still moving at a very high speed. This tells me that either they landed very long which you would never do intentionally, or they touched down with the gear retracted and then like the Pakistani Air attempted to go around. That would explain both the high speed and the fact the flaps don’t seem to be fully extended.
If reports of a bird strike are correct that would not explain what we are seeing. A bird strike is very unlikely to fully disable the gear but if it disabled an engine that could have been a distraction that led to the gear up landing.
But again if you know your landing gear up you declare an Emergency which deploys the fire trucks and you land in the normal place on the runway. The only way you can explain the high speed of the aircraft when it goes off the end of the runway is either that the crew landed well down the runway or that they touched down having forgotten to lower the gear and then tried to go around.
It’s also interesting that in the video the right engine at least looks to be in reverse and the flaps and slats look to be fully retracted. We also have no evidence of spoilers being deployed. The fact the flaps and slats look to be retracted is a very bad sign as you would never intentionally land that way especially with the gear inoperative.
I suspect that investigators should have a good understanding of the cause of this accident very quickly given the video evidence and the fact the FDR and CVR should be recovered very shortly.” – 121Pilot
Possible Causes
Here are some guesses based on what we have seen and what we know.
- Bird Strike – One conclusion is that the aircraft encountered an issue on short final, perhaps a bird strike if the two videos can be taken together, and that caused distracted pilots to lose sight of their basic landing checklists and miss the gear down piece. If there were alarms and indicators flooding the cockpit as well as a challenged engine it might be possible to ignore or not hear the warnings that the gear was not engaged. The plane hits the runway, the pilots realize the gear is not down, attempt a go-around increasing speed and retracting the flaps but it’s only compounded the problem and once it’s clear the aircraft will not climb, it’s too late.
- Inexperience – A Pakistan International Airlines A320 failed a go-around when landing without a landing gear engaged. “The aircraft ultimately made a gear-up touchdown on runway 25L, damaging its engines, before the crew attempted a go-around, during which the jet lost height and came down in a residential suburb.” – Flight Global. It’s possible that “poor airmanship” led to landing without the gear down and then the crew made matters worse trying to fix it instead of accepting a failed landing and sliding to a stop.
- Malfunction – There could have been some sort of other aircraft malfunction that’s not apparent in the footage. The ADS-B dropping off 500 feet from the runway suggests something was askew and wouldn’t be related to landing gear nor a bird strike. The flaps being fully retracted so quickly after touchdown, no apparent speed brakes, one reverse thruster clearly engaged while the other appears to be retracted makes for a messy conclusion and one that might not be clear in the 14 second video we have.
Conclusion
It’s hard to ascertain this early into the process what could have caused Jeju 2216 to crash in Muan, South Korea. There are some clues but many conflicting pieces that make it difficult to lean in any one direction. It may be months or even years before we fully understand what brought down this aircraft. Our thoughts are with the passengers, crew, and their families.
Asiana 214 was pilot error so it’s likely this will be the same.
After tgatKorean pilots have a questionable CRM/safety culture.
EDIT…after Asiana 214, several western pilots who had taught in Korea noted that there was a questionable safety/CRM culture.
That has been discussed for decades Especially in the area of never questioning the Captain. However, some years ago, Delta was hired as a consultant for Korean Airlines to help implement better CRM practices which greatly improved the culture there. Since then things have been far better with KAL. But I wonder if this never spread to the other carriers and the pilot culture outside of Korean Airlines.
@Antwerp … Good point . A lot of “bossing” around , and a lot of “unapproachability” . If their army is any indication , so “strict” as to be inflexable .
How about speculation that the North Korean threat causes brick walls to be built around runways? If there were no brick walls, 30 people would be dead, 150 alive. No immediate fireball.
@derek … Good point . Why not open fields at the end of the runway ?
Totally bogus. Not sure what world you’re living in, but where I live, major airports are built in populated areas. This aircraft was doomed before it even touched land. When an airport is in a populated area, you want to contain incidents like this to the airfield. If you look at Google Maps, you’ll see due south of the airfield appears to be a major highway or throughfare, and two hotels. So it would have crashed into a populated area and killed even more people were it not contained to the airfield.
If the bird strike blew the hydraulics, which would have presumably required the engine to throw a blade and sever the hydraulics (unlikely because the airplane didn’t appear to be out of control) how did they get the tr to deploy?
Just a quick look points me toward Korean “airmanship”. I think the ADS-B being deactivated was deliberate (as in the airplane didnt do it itself) because I think they were too preoccupied with the engine out that they weren’t really paying attention to anything else.
Can a 737 typed provide thoughs?
I dispute your term of Korean airmanship, as poor airmanship comes from poor training not ethnicity. However, you are correct there is no way a bird strike taking out even BOTH engines should result in this configuration for landing. Flaps in 737 have electric redundancy, and landing gear can be mechanically released from the cockpit– then gravity pulls it down and locks it in place. The fact that the flaps were up and the landing gear stowed points to a grossly mismanaged approach or botched go-around– but not “Korean airmanship”.
It’s a Korean cultural issue.
I assume you’re talking about crew resource management? No. that’s a training issue, not a cultural issue.
Plane hit hard objects holding the ILS antennas at the end of the runway causing it to crumple.
https://youtu.be/1vjMRCG7Mjg?si=Q5nR1i48Y7O5vzTF
@Mr G – That helps to make the picture clearer. I’m sure even more will be revealed in the coming weeks because at the time of writing it was a series of facts that didn’t quite add up.
What is this “Pakistani Air”? At least have the courtesy to get the name of the airline right.