Aviation experts are questioning the role of an airport design that built a mound of dirt and a concrete wall behind the tip of a runway into which Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 crashed on Sunday morning, killing all but two of the 181 people on board.
The plane, a Boeing After an evening flight, the 737-800 landed on the runway at Muan International Airport in southwest South Korea, apparently with the flaps and landing gear retracted. The jetliner burst into flames after hitting the bottom and the wall where a tracking device that guides aircraft onto the runway had been installed.
“That certainly made it difficult to stop the plane safely,” said Todd Curtis, founding father of Air Safe Media, which tracks aviation accidents and other incidents. Curtis worked as a security engineer at Boeing for nearly a decade.
Accident investigators will need months, if not longer, to uncover the reason behind the crash, the worst aviation disaster ever in South Korea and the deadliest crash in years. They'll examine all the things from aircraft maintenance records to pilots' flight planning to cockpit voice recorders.
Initial indications suggest that a bird strike could have played a key role within the possible engine failure. Experts warned that the investigation was still at a really early stage.
Some aviation experts say the death toll might have been minimized if the plane had not collided with the concrete wall.
In the video of the Jeju Air plane landing, “you can see the plane sliding along, it's slowing down, they're slowing down and everything's going pretty well until they hit the wall,” said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant and a Boeing 737- Pilot.
Cox said he suspects the reason behind death for many of the passengers on board was “blunt force trauma from wall impact.”
Barriers behind airport runways are common and really useful.
For example, New York's LaGuardia Airport and other airports have installed EMAS (Engineered Material Arresting Systems) – a crushable material that slows a plane off the runway and prevents it from taxiing into more dangerous areas. In 2016, then-vice presidential candidate Mike Pence's plane overran a runway in LaGuardia and was ultimately stopped by EMAS.
The barrier at the sting of Muan International Airport's runway didn’t look like fragile or able to falling apart, in response to video footage and expert evaluation, which is what investigators are more likely to concentrate on.
image credit : www.cnbc.com