Seoul, South Korea — South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 planes operated by the country's airlines as they try to determine the cause of the failure 179 people died in a plane crash the day before.
Sunday's crash, the country's worst aviation disaster in decades, sparked a surge of national sympathy.
Many people are worried about how well the South Korean government will handle the disaster as it grapples with a leadership vacuum after the recent back-to-back the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol and Prime Minister and Acting President Han Dak Suof the country's two top officials, amid political unrest caused by Yun the brief imposition of martial law earlier this month.
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New acting president Choi Sang-mok chaired a meeting of the disaster task force on Monday and ordered authorities to carry out an emergency review of the country's aircraft operating systems.
“The essence of a responsible response will be to upgrade aviation security systems as a whole to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents and build a safer Republic of South Korea,” said Choi, who is also deputy prime minister and finance minister.
A Boeing 737-800 of the South Korean budget airline Jeju Air aborted its first landing attempt for reasons that are not yet clear. Then, on a second landing attempt, he received a bird strike warning from ground control before the pilot sounded the distress signal. The plane landed without the front landing gear deployed, flew over the runway, crashed into a concrete fence and exploded in a fireball.
Alan Price, a former chief pilot for Delta Air Lines and now a consultant, said the Boeing 737-800 is a “proven aircraft” that belongs to a different class of aircraft than the airliner Airplane Boeing 737 Max which was linked to fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019.
But South Korea's transport ministry said Monday it plans to conduct a safety inspection of all 101 Boeing 737-800 planes operated by the country's airlines, as well as a broader review of safety standards at Jeju Air, which operates 39 of those planes. Senior ministry official Joo Jung-wan said representatives from the US National Transportation Safety Board and Boeing are expected to arrive in South Korea on Monday to take part in the investigation.
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Ministry officials also said they would examine whether Muan Airport's localizer – a concrete fence that houses a set of antennas designed to safely guide aircraft during landing – should have been made of lighter materials that break more easily on impact.
Joo said the ministry had identified similar concrete structures at other domestic airports, including Jeju Island and the southern cities of Yeosu and Pohang, as well as airports in the United States, Spain and South Africa.
Video of the crash showed that the pilots did not deploy the flaps or slats to slow the plane, indicating a possible hydraulic failure, and did not manually lower the landing gear, suggesting they were too late, said John Cox, a retired airline pilot and CEO of Safety Operating Systems at St. Petersburg, Florida.
Even so, the jet was under control and traveling in a straight line, and damage and injuries likely would have been minimized had it not been for the barrier being so close to the runway, Cox said.
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Other observers said video footage showed the plane was suffering from a suspected engine problem, but that an undercarriage malfunction was likely the direct cause of the crash. They said there was unlikely to be a connection between the chassis problem and the suspected engine problem.
Earlier on Monday, another Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air returned to Seoul's Gimpo International Airport shortly after takeoff when the pilot discovered an undercarriage problem. Song Kyung-hoon, CEO of Jeju Air, said the problem was resolved through communication with the ground equipment center, but the pilot decided to return to Gimpho as a precaution.
Local media reported that 21 passengers decided not to board the replacement flight to Jeju due to security concerns and other reasons, according to Agence France-Presse.
Ministry officials said on Monday that the flight data and cockpit voice recordings of the crashed plane had been transferred to a research center at Gimpho Airport before being analyzed. Ministry officials previously said that the investigation into the crash would take several months.
The Muan disaster is the deadliest aviation disaster in South Korea since 1997, when a Korean Airline plane crashed in Guam, killing 228 people on board.
The disaster left many South Koreans shocked and ashamed, and the government declared seven days of national mourning until January 4. Some questioned whether the disaster was related to safety or regulatory concerns, such as the 2022 Seoul Halloween disaster that killed 160 people and the 2014 ferry sinking that killed 304.
The Department of Transportation said authorities have identified 146 bodies and are collecting DNA samples and fingerprints from the remaining 33.
Park Han Shin, a spokesman for the families of the victims, said they were told the bodies were so badly damaged that officials needed time before returning them to their families.
“I demand that the government mobilize more personnel to bring back our brothers and family members as soon as possible,” he said, fighting back tears.
The accident was even more important news for South Koreans already reeling from a political crisis triggered by Yun's martial law decree, which brought hundreds of soldiers to the streets of Seoul and rekindled traumatic memories of past military rule in the 1970s and 1980s.
The political upheaval led to the opposition-controlled National Assembly impeaching Yun and Khan. The security minister resigned and the police chief was arrested for his role in enforcing martial law.
The absence of senior officials responsible for disaster relief was a cause for concern.
“We are deeply concerned about whether the Central Headquarters for Disaster Management and Security Measures can really handle the disaster,” the widely circulated newspaper JoongAng Ilbo said in an editorial on Monday.