Aviation Consultant Says Official Explanation of South Korean Plane Crash Doesn't Add Up
An aviation expert said that a bird strike alone would not sufficiently explain why a South Korean airline jet skidded off a runway and crashed, killing nearly every passenger on board.
On Sunday, Jeju Air Flight 2216 was landing at Muan International Airport about 180 miles south of Seoul when the incident occurred, according to the Wall Street Journal. The crash killed 179 of the 181 passengers and crew members onboard.
WARNING: The following post contains video of the crash, which may be disturbing for some readers.
🚨BREAKING: SENSITIVE Footage of the Jeju Air Flight 2216 crash in South Korea, carrying 181 people, has been released.
pic.twitter.com/x61LSTLvIS— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 29, 2024
“There are a million backups on this airplane. It’s extremely safe, and that’s what a lot of people are saying. They can’t understand why this airplane was landed on that runway at that speed with no flaps, with no gear. There might have been something else involved,” aviation consultant Mike Boyd told Fox News on Sunday.
“A bird strike on an engine might shut an engine down, but there’s so many redundant systems there, it just doesn’t make sense. We’re not in the dark, but we know the runway is 9,200 feet. It’s a very long runway. [The plane] did come in hot and high, hot and fast. We don’t know why that was the real issue,” he added.
Boyd suggested a hydraulic failure may also have occurred.
“The gear is not extended. The flaps are not extended, which would indicate that there was a major hydraulic failure of some kind there,” he observed.
“Even when there’s a hydraulic failure, there’s a mechanical way of dropping the landing gear. That was not done,” Boyd further noted. “I think we’re going to be kind of in the dark here until we find the cockpit voice recorder and the black box for this, because it looks like there was a bird strike from some earlier picture of it.”
“There might have been other things that happened to that airplane. We don’t know, but it’s very strange to have that airplane land that hot on a runway … where it literally was still going pretty strong when they hit that wall,” Boyd emphasized.
John Cox — a retired airline pilot and CEO of Safety Operating Systems in St. Petersburg, Florida — concurred with Boyd that a hydraulic failure would explain why the pilots did not deploy the flaps to slow the aircraft before landing, the Associated Press reported.
He further suggested the reason they did not manually deploy the landing gear is that they did not have time.
Rescuers work at the wreckage of passenger plane #Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 at Muan International Airport in Muan-gun, #SouthKorea. The #plane carrying 181 people crashed after skidding off the runway and colliding with a wall, resulting in an explosion. 📷: Chung Sung-Jun pic.twitter.com/CvXysJ0KSh
— Getty Images News (@GettyImagesNews) December 29, 2024
The Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air “aborted its first landing attempt for reasons that aren’t immediately clear,” according to the AP.
“Then, during its second landing attempt, it received a bird strike warning from the ground control center before its pilot issued a distress signal. The plane landed without its front landing gear deployed, overshot the runway, slammed into a concrete fence, and burst into a fireball,” the news outlet said.
Alan Price, a former chief pilot at Delta Air Lines and now a consultant, told the AP that the Boeing 737-800 is a “proven airplane” and not to be confused with the Boeing 737 Max, which was involved in fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019.
Representatives from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and from Boeing were expected to arrive in South Korea on Monday to participate with local officials in the investigation of the crash.
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