Almost a month after the serious crash of Jeju Air at South Korea’s Muan airport, in which 179 people died, a preliminary report provided a broader picture of the sequence of events that ended with the explosion of the Boeing 737-800 aircraft after it crashed into a concrete structure.
According to the Airline Ratings portal, the accident log has been completed, describing the events of the last nine minutes of the flight before the tragic explosion at the end of the runway. At 8:54, the control tower cleared Jeju Air Flight 2216 to land on runway 01 of Muan Airport. At 8:57, the tower issued a warning about bird activity on the approach to the airport, and two minutes later, at 8:59, flight 2216 declared a mayday during the approach due to a bird strike and went into a go around. At 9:00 a.m., the aircraft decided to approach again, this time to runway 19, from the opposite direction, which the tower approved. At 9:02 the aircraft came into contact with the runway with its landing gear retracted and at 9:03, after failing to stop, it hit a concrete structure at the end of the runway and exploded.
The black box, or flight data recorder, and the cockpit voice recorder stopped recording four minutes before the accident. The exact cause of this is still under investigation, but the most likely option is that it stopped recording due to a loss of power or an electrical failure caused by the engine failure. As a result, there is no data on the last minutes of the flight, nor is there any confirmation did the pilots attempt to restart the engines? The recorders have been sent for further analysis.
With feathers and blood found in both engines, preliminary reports of this tragic accident indicate that Jeju Air Flight 2216 suffered a bird strike resulting in a complete loss of power and hydraulic system. Due to the loss of both engines in the final phase of flight and the hydraulics that, among other things, control the landing gear, there was not enough time to attempt to lower the landing gear using an alternative method using gravity. The loss of hydraulics is one of the critical factors in this accident, since the hydraulics control important flight characteristics of the aircraft necessary for controlling the movement and stability of the aircraft. Weather conditions have been ruled out as a contributing factor to the accident.
The Jeju Air accident has raised safety questions about the carrier’s emergency protocols, wild bird strike risk mitigation protocols, and the readiness of air traffic controllers and airport for emergency response. Namely, there are several areas around the airport in Muan where birds reside and feed, and this poses a significant safety problem for aircraft taking off and landing at the airport. The delay in the arrival of emergency services was also problematic. It is mentioned that despite the timely notification of the accident, there was a miscommunication between the control tower and the emergency services teams which delayed their arrival at the correct location of the accident. The aforementioned delay was also influenced by the lack of adequate access routes to the accident site, and traffic jams on the available access route resulted in a delay in the arrival of the emergency services to the accident site. There was also the question of the existence of a concrete barrier in the plane of the runway, used for navigational purposes.
This accident should trigger improvements to the aforementioned safety protocols to prevent the this kind of scenarios and potential tragedies in the future. In response, South Korea decided to replace concrete barriers with breakable structures at several airports across the country following this tragic accident.