South Korea is conducting an investigation into all Boeing aircraft of the type that crashed on the runway of Muan airport on Sunday. All 101 Boeing 737-800 aircraft in use by South Korean airlines will be inspected, newly appointed interim President Choi Sang-mok announced on Monday.
Experts from the US National Road Safety Council and Boeing will also come to South Korea for the inspection. The accident-plagued aircraft manufacturer – in 2018 and 2019 two Boeing 737 Max crashes, resulting in a total of 346 deaths – immediately saw its shares fall sharply in value on Monday. Since then, most of the losses on the stock market have been recovered.
Jeju Air, the budget airline responsible for the disaster flight, promised in a press conference on Tuesday to reduce its schedule for this winter by 10 to 15 percent in order to carry out more maintenance on its fleet. According to CEO Kim Yi-bae, this measure should not be interpreted as an acknowledgment that his company uses too many aircraft.
Two survivors
In the accident in Muan, a city in the south of the Korean peninsula, 179 people were killed on Sunday when the plane crashed into a concrete wall during a failed landing. All 175 passengers and four of the six crew members lost their lives. The two survivors, aged 25 and 32, have injuries ranging from a shoulder fracture to a fractured skull.
Hundreds of relatives have spent most of the past few days at Muan’s small airport, waiting for the bodies of their loved ones to be released. A report from the BBC shows the running emotions among family members who feel that they are receiving too little information and that the wait for the passengers’ remains is taking too long. A police commissioner tried to calm the mood by explaining in painful detail how much the bodies were mutilated. He said police needed time to piece together victims’ remains.
Acting President Choi Sang-mok urged investigators searching the plane’s remains to act more urgently to meet the wishes of the relatives. A few days ago, Choi was deputy prime minister and minister of finance, until he replaced the previous acting president on Friday in the chaotic political situation in South Korea. In early December, then-President Yoon Suk-yeol attempted a coup by declaring a state of emergency. An arrest warrant was issued for him on Tuesday for abuse of power and incitement to insurrection.
The acting president who replaced Yoon was ousted again last week. Choi was then put forward as the new head of state. He declared a seven-day period of national mourning on Monday to commemorate the victims of the worst air disaster in Korean history.
Black box
The cause of the disaster is still unclear. The flight data recorder, also known as a black box, was recovered from the debris, but is so damaged that not all data can be read (immediately), according to the South Korean Ministry of Transport.
The aircraft arrived from Bangkok on Sunday morning and received a warning from the control tower about birds near the runway just before landing. A few minutes later the captain reported that the aircraft had been hit by birds, then that he wanted to make a go-around. Now he flew in from the north. The aircraft only landed on the tarmac more than halfway down the runway, did not have its landing gear extended and rammed into a concrete wall at the end of the runway and exploded.
The placement of a concrete wall about 140 meters from the end of the runway is under investigation, according to a senior official from South Korea’s Ministry of Spatial Planning and Infrastructure who The New York Times spoke. The structure was there as a basis for an antenna from the beacon system. In the same article, the newspaper cited aviation experts who believed they could conclude from the videos of the crash landing that the pilot did not have proper control of the plane’s engines and could therefore not use them to slow down.
It is still unclear what the connection is between the report of the bird collision and the fact that the aircraft landed without the landing gear extended. Inspection of all South Korean Boeing 737-800s could lead to the conclusion that a design error is also suspected. But unlike the Max variant, the device has a very good reputation in terms of safety. About 4,400 Boeing 737-800s fly worldwide.