SEOUL, South Korea – An unhappy year-end looms over South Korea’s winter of discontent as a politically polarized nation ponders the carnage caused by the crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 Sunday morning.

A Boeing 737-800, en route from Bangkok and flown by the country’s leading low-cost airline, crash landed at Muan, in Korea’s southwest, killing 179 of 181 persons aboard.

As bodies are identified and information is released, grieving relatives are camping out Monday at Muan International Airport in government-supplied tents erected in the terminal.

Altars are being established nationwide, and flags are flying at half mast as Korea enters a week of mourning. Acting President Choi Sang-mok finds himself overseeing a national disaster investigation just days after taking office.

The country is in the grip of a political crisis that has seen both the president and his successor impeached this month. No end is in sight, with the presidency disempowered and the National Assembly at daggers drawn.

Prior deadly disasters, notably the 2014 sinking of the ferry Sewol, and a crowd crush on Halloween in Seoul in 2022, have adversely impacted presidential administrations. The crash investigation, however, is a technical matter.

SEE ALSO: Nearly 200 people dead in fiery airliner crash in South Korea

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and experts from Boeing have joined Korea’s National Transportation Safety Board to probe the disaster, Yonhap News Agency reported.

Three critical factors have been identified so far: A bird strike on the plane’s starboard engine; a decontrolled crash landing without undercarriage lowered; and collision with a solid concrete structure just behind the runway.

Raising further questions for investigators is the fact that three more landing gear/hydraulic incidents impacted aircraft worldwide in the wake of the Muan crash — though none were deadly.

Six minutes to tragedy

Briefings by authorities and analysis of footage shows that events accelerated from airside crisis to landing pad disaster to incendiary tragedy in approximately six minutes.

In clear conditions, Muan Control Tower warned the pilot of Flight 2216 of a flock of birds in the air space at 8:57 a.m.

Muan International is surrounded by three migratory bird sites, and 10 bird-related incidents were reported between 2019 and August 2024, Korean media reported.

One minute later, the pilot declared Mayday, citing a bird strike. He attempted to land from the takeoff end of the runway, with the tower’s permission.

In smartphone powerhouse South Korea, the doom of Flight 2216 was captured in footage shot by persons in or around the airport and shared across social media.

One clip shows an apparent bird impact, to the aircraft’s starboard jet intake, causing a “compressor stall” — disruption of airflow in the engine unit. There is neither explosion nor an apparent engine fire.

Another clip shows the plane lined up to land without landing gear deployed. It does not touch down until well along the length of the runway.

Subsequent clips show the aircraft skidding along on its belly with smoke, but not flame, streaming from its starboard engine.

Then at high speed, the aircraft careens of the end of the runway directly into a concrete antennae base, explodes and disintegrates. It was 9:03 a.m.

Concrete structure was the killer

Korean media are already questioning whether communications between the aircraft and the tower were flawed, notably whether it was essential to crash land so quickly.

Usual procedure is for a plane to go into a holding pattern, while communicating with on-ground experts, so flight crew can go through checklists to resolve onboard problems.

The mass solidity of an earth-and-concrete base for airport navigation aids, known as localizer antennae, reportedly built last year, is being widely criticized.

“I don’t know who designed that,” Denis Davydov, a pilot and former 737-800 captain, stated on YouTube’s Pilot Blog. He added that had the plane crashed into Muan’s perimeter wall, bricks would have displaced and the impact would been less catastrophic.

Calling it “a huge obstacle right off the end of the runway,” the berm was “a large contributor to the fact that there were only two survivors,” said Juan Browne, an air crash assessor on YouTube’s Blancolirio.

At most airports localizer antennae have “… a frangible, or breakable connection with the ground where, if struck, the antennae will easily break away,” Mr. Browne said.

Barrier impact at high speed was the killing event. The contributing factor was nondeployment of landing gear and related decontrol on the runway.

What is happening to landing gear?

Damage to one engine of a 737-800 should not prevent it from flying on its second jet. Nor should it impact hydraulics or landing gear.

“A bird strike has nothing to do with hydraulics or landing gear, there is so much built-in redundancy,” noted Mr. Browne. Citing 737 blueprints, he showed three, independent hydraulic systems: Two are driven by the jet engines and electric motors, the third by an electric motor.

If all fail, there is a manual fail-safe.

Mr. Davydov showed stock footage of a Boeing 737-800’s manually operated cable mechanism, used by pilots in the cockpit to lower the undercarriage in event of hydraulic failure.

That had not been done on Flight 2216, Mr. Davydov said: Crash footage showed latches on the underside were not released. 

Mr. Browne suggested that the crew had not had time to go through the necessary safety protocols.

The Muan disaster was just the first in a series of four landing gear-related incidents worldwide in less than 24 hours.

A De Havilland DHC-8-402 Air Canada Express suffered “a suspected landing gear issue” while landing at Halifax Stanfield International Airport in Nova Scotia. The event took place around 9:30 p.m. on Dec. 29, Canada-time — i.e. after the Sunday morning Korea-time disaster in Muan

Footage shot from the cabin showed flames flaring on the plane’s port side, but there were no casualties.

Also late on Dec. 29, Norway-time, a Dutch commercial Boeing 737-800 veered off the right side of a runway after landing at Oslo Torp Sandefjord Airport. The flight had diverted there to land shortly after takeoff from Oslo Airport, citing hydraulic failure.

No injuries were reported.

On Monday morning, another Boeing 737-800, again operated by Jeju Air left Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport at 6:47 a.m., returned soon after takeoff, after onboard systems detected a landing gear issue.

It landed safely at 7:25 a.m.

Whether the four incidents are coincidence, or whether an issue with engineering components and/or hydraulic fluid is impacting different models of aircraft, operated by multiple airlines, on different continents, is unknown.

Correction: In a previous version of the story, Muan was misspelled in a few references to the airport.

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.