Aviation experts are questioning whether a bird strike could have caused the crash of Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 at the weekend, which killed 179 of 191 passengers on board the flight.
The crash is the deadliest in South Korean history and has been blamed by some on a bird strike.
Horrifying footage posted to social media showed the Boeing 737-800 landing on its belly at Muan International Airport after its landing-gear failed to deploy, before skidding off the end of the runway and exploding as it collided with barriers.
The control tower at the airport apparently issued a bird-strike warning to the cabin crew, before the pilots declared mayday and attempted a landing.
“At this point there are a lot more questions than we have answers. Why was the plane going so fast? Why were the flaps not open? Why was the landing gear not down?” said Gregory Alegi, an expert and former instructor at Italy’s air-force academy.
Christian Beckert, a Lufthansa pilot, said the video footage suggested the footage showed the plane’s braking systems were not activated, causing it to land too fast.
He added that a bird strike would be unlikely to damage the landing gear wile it was raised, and that if a strike had happened when it was down, it would have been difficult to raise again.
“It’s really, really very rare and very unusual not to lower the gear, because there are independent systems where we can lower the gear with an alternate system,” he said.
Following international aviation rules, South Korea will now conduct a detailed civil investigation to establish the cause of the fatal crash. This will also involve the National Transportation Safety Board in the US, where the plane was built.
An investigation is likely to take months.
The plane’s data recorder and cockpit recorder have both been retrieved.
The 737-900 is one of the world’s most popular airliners and was developed before the MAX variant that has been at the center of a costly safety scandal for Boeing in recent years.
2024 has been described as a “miserable” year for the aviation giant.
As the BBC reports, “Not only has it struggled to cope with a safety and quality control crisis, it has lost billions of dollars following a strike by workers that paralysed production at two of its biggest factories.
“Even its space programme has been in trouble. Two astronauts were left stranded on the International Space Station in June after their Boeing Starliner capsule developed a potential fault, which would have made returning to Earth in it too dangerous.”
The company also faces an internal crisis of confidence in management.
During a Congressional hearing in June about safety failures at the company, executives were accused by Republican Senator Josh Hawley of “strip-mining” the company for profit and cutting corners on safety in order to boost earnings.
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