Jetliner skids off runway and bursts into flames while landing in South Korea, killing 179

A Boeing jetliner skidded off a runway, slammed into a concrete fence and burst into flames Sunday in South Korea after its landing gear apparently failed to deploy.

All but two of the 181 people on board were killed in one of the country’s worst aviation disasters, officials said.

The Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air plane arrived from Bangkok and crashed while attempting to land in the town of Muan, about 180 miles south of Seoul.

Boeing investigators are already on their way to the scene of the crash to assist with the investigation by South Korean authorities.

Footage of the crash aired by South Korean television channels showed the plane skidding across the airstrip at high speed, evidently with its landing gear still closed, and slamming into a concrete wall, triggering an explosion.

Other TV stations aired footage showing thick, black smoke billowing from the plane, which was engulfed in flames.

The crash killed 179 people, the South Korean fire agency said.

Emergency workers pulled two crew members to safety.

They were conscious and did not appear to have any life-threatening injuries, health officials said.

Lee Jeong-hyeon, chief of the Muan fire station, told a televised briefing that the plane was completely destroyed, with only the tail assembly still recognizable in the wreckage.

Officials were investigating the cause of the crash, including whether the aircraft was struck by birds, Lee said.

The control tower issued a warning about birds to the plane shortly before it intended to land and gave the crew permission to land in a different area, ministry officials said.

The crew sent out a distress signal shortly before the crash, officials said.

Pacific Northwest-based aviation safety expert John Nance tells KIRO Newsradio it’s likely there was more than just one single factor that caused the crash.

“There is never just one cause,” said Nance.  “It’s always a multiplicity of causes linking together.”

He says the black boxes, which are actually not black at all, but orange-colored, will give some information.  But he says they may not answer the question of why the aircraft’s landing gear was not deployed.

“They’ll give a very good indication of the dynamics, including the flight path of the airplane, which is already, to a certain extent, known,” Nance said.  “It may help us explain a lot of aspects of it, but it won’t explain everything.”

Nance says one central question the investigation must address which the black boxes may not provide information about, is why the plane skidded onto the runway without its landing gear.

“One thing is for certain, the landing gear on a 737 is very, very simple, very straight-forward, very hard to mess up,” Nance said.  “Unless you collide with something and I don’t believe that  bird strike could do that.  So the question of why the gear was retracted is a very central question to the investigation.”

Northwest-based personal injury attorney Mark Lindquist represents victims and their families in cases of wrongful death or injury and specializes in aviation and plane incidents.

He says it’s much too early in the South Korea investigation to come to any conclusions about a cause.

“For example, why were the flaps down?  Why were the landing gear not down?  Why was the plane coming in so hot on the runway,” Lindquist said.  “So we just don’t know at this point.”

Nance points out that close to 90% of major air disasters are caused by human error.

“The fact that there was a general call from the tower to be wary of possible bird activity, i.e. warning of bird strikes, and then a mayday call from the airplane, and then several minutes elapsing before the aircraft made the approach, is all very incongruous,” Nance said.  “It suggests a situation that was proliferating, or in other words, something that  was going wrong progressively. It would not have, in my judgment, precluded them from dropping the gear.”

Even if the landing gear had experienced a hydraulic failure, there is a way for the pilots to lower the gear by hand, if necessary.

“Right behind the center console on the floor, there is a hatch.  We’re all familiar with it. We’re all trained in it. You flip the hatch up and you’ve got three T-handles. You pull each one, and they’re long T-handles in terms of the cable that’s attached, you’re releasing the uplocks and  the gear will fall down.”

Nance says why that wasn’t done by the pilots is a mystery.

“It takes about two minutes to do that.  And so the question is why wasn’t it done?  Why did they fell they had to get it on the ground that fast?  What was going on in that cockpit?  Some of that is going to be very difficult to find out.”

The airline that owned the 737-800 is JeJu Air, which was established in 2005 as South Korea’s largest low-cost airline.

But Lindquist says no one should jump to conclusions about its safety record or maintenance history, simply because it is a discount airline.

“When the Lion Air crash occurred in Indonesia in 2018, everyone was quick to blame Lion Air, because the airline had a spotty safety record,” Lindquist said.  “Later we discovered the fault was all with Boeing.  So I would caution anyone about leaping to conclusions about fault this early in the process.”

South Korea Senior Transport Ministry official Joo Jong-wan said workers have retrieved the jet’s black boxes, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders.

But he said it may take months for investigators to complete their probe.

The runway at the Muan airport will be closed until Jan. 1, the ministry said.

Kyle Bailey, former FAA safety team representative in the U.S., told Fox News that it appeared to him that the aircraft was traveling too fast as it skidded on the the runway before striking what he believed was a structure that housed instrument landing equipment.

“I think that’s pretty much what spelled disaster for that airplane,” he said.

Following the crash, some analysts have conjectured whether it would be a good idea to put in place some sort of crushed material around the edge of airport runways to absorb the impact of a jet that skids off the tarmac.

That’s something aviation expert John Nance says is simply not feasible at thousands of airports around the world.

“That’s going to be of no value if you skid off a runway,” Nance remarked.  “And runways all over the planet, even the best of them and the biggest airports, will have certain features that fall off on one side or the other or structures that intersect.”

He says planes are engineered to stay on the runways and protecting them when they roll off them is just not possible.

” We design these things to keep them on the tarmac, on the runway and not have them go off to the side,” he said.  “If you started designing every airport to be completely fail-safe in terms of anything out there they might hit if they run off the runway, you’d have to reconstruct about 80% of the airports in the world for billions of dollars.”

Lindquist says while Boeing has had a rough couple of years in terms of the safety of its airplanes, the company has the ability to help investigators determine more about the cause of this crash.

“Boeing’s credibility is not exactly flying high lately, given all the problems we’ve seen from Boeing planes in  the last several years,” Lindquist said. “That said, Boeing does have unique knowledge and expertise that could assist the investigation.”

One of the survivors was being treated for fractures to his ribs, shoulder blade and upper spine, said Ju Woong, director of the Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital. Ju said the man, whose name was not released, told doctors he “woke up to find (himself) rescued.” Details on the other survivor were not immediately available.

The passengers were predominantly South Korean and included two people from Thailand. Officials identified 88 of them in the hours after the crash, the fire agency said.

Thailand’s prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, expressed condolences to the families of those aboard the plane in a post on X. Paetongtarn said she ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to provide assistance.

Boonchuay Duangmanee, the father of a Thai passenger, told The Associated Press that his daughter, Jongluk, had been working in a factory in South Korea for several years and returned to Thailand to visit her family.

“I never thought that this would be the last time we would see each other forever,” he said.

Kerati Kijmanawat, the director of Thailand’s airports, confirmed in a statement that Jeju Air flight 7C 2216 departed from Suvarnabhumi Airport with no reports of anything abnormal aboard the aircraft or on the runway.

Jeju Air in a statement expressed its “deep apology” over the crash and said it will do its “utmost to manage the aftermath of the accident.”

In a televised news conference, the company’s president, Kim E-bae, bowed deeply with other senior company officials as he apologized to bereaved families and said he feels “full responsibility” for the crash. Kim said the company had not identified any mechanical problems with the aircraft following regular checkups and that he would wait for the results of government investigations into the cause of the incident.

Family members wailed as officials announced the names of some victims at a lounge in the Muan airport.

Boeing said in a statement on X that it was in contact with Jeju Air and was ready to support the company in dealing with the crash.

The crash happened as South Korea is embroiled in a political crisis triggered by President Yoon Suk Yeol’s stunning imposition of martial law and ensuing impeachment. South Korean lawmakers on Friday impeached acting President Han Duck-soo and suspended his duties, leading Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok to take over.

Choi, who traveled to the site in Muan, called for officials to use all available resources to identify the dead as soon as possible. The government declared Muan a special disaster zone and designated a weeklong national mourning period.

Yoon’s office said his chief secretary, Chung Jin-suk, presided over an emergency meeting between senior presidential staff to discuss the crash and reported the details to Choi. Yoon expressed condolences to the victims in a Facebook posting.

In Rome’s St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis said he joined in “prayer for the survivors and the dead.”

The Muan crash is one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea’s aviation history. The last time South Korea suffered a large-scale air disaster was in 1997, when a Korean Airline plane crashed in Guam, killing 228 people on board. In 2013, an Asiana Airlines plane crash-landed in San Francisco, killing three and injuring about 200.

Sunday’s accident was also one of the worst landing mishaps since a July 2007 crash that killed all 187 people on board and 12 others on the ground when an Airbus A320 slid off a slick airstrip in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and hit a nearby building, according to data compiled by the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit group aimed at improving air safety.

In 2010, 158 people died when an Air India Express aircraft overshot a runway in Mangalore, India, and plummeted into a gorge before erupting into flames, according to the safety foundation.

(The Associated Press and Fox News contributed information for this story.)