Cause of South Korea plane crash vague as authorities center on fowl strikes

Experts say feathered creature strikes are generally common and ought to not have been sufficient to cause landing adapt failure

No one knows for certain what caused Jeju Discuss flight 2216 to crash, slaughtering all but two of its 181 travelers and team. As haziness fell at Muan worldwide airplane terminal in South Korea and authorities handled questions from troubled relatives of the dead, the most likely clarification was that the plane had been struck by one or more fowls, activating a grouping of occasions that anticipated the pilot from sending the landing gear.

Aviation authorities centered on fowl strikes – and, to a lesser degree, the climate – as the most likely cause, indeed as a few specialists said the moderately common wonder would not have been sufficient to cause a disastrous disappointment of the landing gear.
It has been detailed that the control tower at Muan issued a feathered creature strike caution in no time some time recently the pilot made a mayday call.
“Staff individuals all said they had never seen so numerous feathered creatures some time recently. They all of a sudden flew in from exterior the airport,” an mysterious air terminal official told the South Korean news location OhmyNews.

More will be known once authorities have assessed flight information recovered from the flotsam and jetsam of the Boeing 737-800, but flying specialists said a fowl strike alone likely would not have carried the affect required to cripple the landing gear.

“A winged creature strike is not unordinary, issues with an undercarriage are not unusual,” said Geoffrey Thomas, the editor of Carrier News. “Bird strikes happen distant more frequently, but regularly they don’t cause the misfortune of an plane by themselves.”
Other specialists reverberated Thomas’s distrust. “I’ve never seen a winged creature strike avoid the landing equip from being extended,” said Geoffrey Dell, an Australian aircraft security master. Trevor Jensen, an Australian flying specialist, said fire and crisis administrations would ordinarily be prepared for a paunch landing, “so this shows up to be unplanned”.
Marco Chan, a senior teacher in flying operations at Buckinghamshire Modern College in Britain, said: “Bird strikes are a noteworthy hazard to airplane, and the peril depends on components like the bird’s measure, the aircraft’s speed, the area of the strike and the motor design.”
Birds weighing up to 1kg “rarely cause disastrous disappointments but can harm motor edges or other basic parts”, Chan said, including that the Boeing 737-800, prepared with CFM56-7B26 motors made by CFM Universal, was planned to handle numerous fowl strike scenarios.

Birds weighing more than 3kg, such as geese or swans, postured the most noteworthy chance, particularly if ingested into an motor, he said. “Even littler winged creatures can cause critical issues at tall speeds, especially if they strike different frameworks. Whereas motors and airframes experience broad testing to oversee these dangers, uncommon and extraordinary scenarios stay a challenge in flying safety.”
Dell said that if a run of feathered creatures had been sucked into the motors, that would not have closed the motors down quickly, giving the pilots time to react.
Footage of Sunday’s crash appears the plane voyaging at speed when it made contact with the landing area. It did not show up to moderate down as it careered along the runway and over a buffer zone specifically in front of the edge wall.
In a normal paunch landing, Thomas said, “you are going to arrive on your motors and you’re going to have a bumpy ride. You come in with least fuel, you have fire tenders in participation, covering the runway with froth, and you arrive at the farthest conclusion of the runway and more often than not it closes up being an Alright situation.”
Rescuers filter through the destruction of a Jeju Discuss Boeing 737-800 that slammed and burst into blazes at Muan universal air terminal in south-west South Korea on Sunday.
South Korean plane crash: what we know so far
Bird strikes regularly happen amid landing and takeoff and are one of the most common dangers to airplane. A later consider by the US Government Flying Organization and the US Division of Farming found that 296,613 “wildlife strikes” were detailed around the world between 1990 and 2023, 98.3% of them in the US and generally birds.
The think about found that the number of episodes had risen nearly each year. Over the 33-year period, 83 winged creature strikes had come about in the annihilation of an airplane, the report said. Almost 70% of the occurrences happened at or underneath 500ft over ground level, whereas those happening over 500ft were more likely to cause damage.

The area of Muan universal air terminal, where Sunday’s crash happened, might turn out to be critical. It sits close three major fowl asylums that serve as wintering grounds for transitory feathered creatures. A study this month by South Korea’s National Organized of Environment recorded about 19,000 transitory feathered creatures in these sanctuaries.
The air terminal has recorded the most elevated rate of fowl strikes among South Korea’s 14 territorial air terminals, with 10 episodes detailed between 2019 and Admirable this year, agreeing to information submitted to parliament by the Korea Airplane terminals Corporation.
A 2020 natural affect appraisal for the airport’s arranged runway extension particularly cautioned of the dangers, noticing that “the external airplane terminal zone has wide farmland and tidal flats” and that the adjacent region was “particularly wealthy in fowl nourishment sources and rest areas”.
Transport service directions require air terminals with one runway to keep up four devoted fowl control staff, or two staff for airplane terminals with less than 5,000 flights every year, like Muan.

Nationwide, feathered creature strike occurrences have been expanding, from 108 in 2019 to 152 final year. A few propose the rise may be connected to climate alter, with transient winged creatures getting to be lasting inhabitants and shifts happening in the timing and species of winged creatures showing up at airports.

Airports utilize different countermeasures counting sound obstructions and checking frameworks, and a few investigating the utilize of AI and radar innovation to track winged creature developments.