At South Korea’s Muan International Airport, a Jeju Air jet belly-landed without its landing gear down, killing all but two of the 181 persons on board before exploding in flames in the country’s worst air tragedy in decades. The reason of the incident is being investigated by accident investigators.
An immediate inspection of South Korea’s Boeing 737-800s, the aircraft type flown on the tragic Jeju Air Flight 7C2216, was ordered by acting President Choi Sang-mok.
One of the most widely used aircraft in the world, the Boeing 737-800 has a solid safety record. It predates the Boeing 737 Max, the model that murdered all 346 passengers on board two deadly disasters in 2018 and 2019. Nearly two years were spent with the 737 Max grounded.
The aviation statistics firm Cirium reports that around 4,400 737-800s are in operation worldwide. This indicates that roughly 17% of all commercial passenger jets in operation worldwide are of this model.
According to Cirium, the average age of the 737-800 fleet worldwide is 13 years, and the final aircraft in the series was delivered roughly five years ago.
The aircraft involved in this weekend’s 2017 crash was delivered to Jeju Air. According to Flightradar24, Ryanair, a low-cost airline from Europe, used to operate it.The plane that crashed was roughly fifteen years old.
Investigators are unlikely to discover a design flaw in the long-flying aircraft, according to aerospace experts.
Richard Aboulafia, managing director of the aerospace consultancy firm AeroDynamic Advisory, said it is nearly unthinkable that they would discover a design issue at this stage.
More questions than answers have been raised by the unusual situation, including why the landing gear wasn’t deployed, and a thorough inquiry could take more than a year. Pilots of the Boeing 737-800 can manually lower the landing gear even in the event of a hydraulic failure.
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One idea is that the engines were rendered inoperable by a potential bird hit.
According to Jeff Guzzetti, a retired air safety inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, if it occurs at the altitude they were at, they might not have had time to complete emergency checklists. He added that the disaster might have been more avoidable if the aircraft hadn’t collided with a solid wall at the end of the runway.
Because the aircraft was built and approved in the United States, the NTSB is in charge of the U.S. team of investigators, which also includes the FAA and Boeing.
The nation where the accident occurred will oversee the entire investigation in accordance with international procedures.
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