From bird strike to crash: the mystery of the Korean plane’s four fateful minutes

Already 30 minutes behind schedule, the pilot flying the Jeju Air jet with 181 people on board was preparing to land at his destination in southwestern South Korea on Sunday morning when the control tower warned him about flocks of birds in the area. Two minutes later, at 8:59 a.m., the pilot reported a “bird strike” and “emergency,” officials said. He told the air traffic control tower at Muan International Airport that he would do “a go-around,” meaning he would abort his first landing attempt and circle in the air to prepare for a second attempt. But he apparently did not have enough time to go all the way around. Instead, just a minute later, the veteran pilot — with nearly 7,000 flight hours in his career — was approaching the runway from the opposite direction, from north to south. And three minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., his plane, Jeju Air Flight 7C2216, slammed into a concrete structure off the southern end of the runway in a ball of flames. All but two of the 181 people on board were killed, most of them South Koreans returning home after a Christmas vacation in Thailand. The crash was the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil and the deadliest worldwide since that of Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018, when all 189 people on board died. As officials were racing to investigate the crash, a central question has emerged among analysts: What happened during the four minutes between the pilot’s urgent report of bird strike and the plane’s fatal crash? Footage of the Boeing 737-800 landing at the airport showed it skidding down the runway without its landing gear deployed. As it hurtled along on its belly, engulfed by what looked like clouds of dust, smoke and sparks, it did not seem able to slow its speed before slamming into the concrete structure 820 feet after the end of the runway. “A big question is why the pilot was in such a hurry to land,” said Hwang Ho-won, chairman of the Korea Association for Aviation Security. When pilots plan to do a belly landing, they usually try to buy time, dumping extra fuel from the air and allowing time for the ground staff to prepare for the emergency, Hwang said. But the Jeju Air pilot apparently decided that he didn’t have such time, he said. “Did he lose both engines?” Mr. Hwang said. “Was the decision to land in such a hurry a human error?”<br/>