Expert Insights on South Korea’s Plane Crash: What Went Wrong?

CGTN Europe

Aviation expert David Learmount analyzes the tragic plane crash at Muan International Airport in South Korea. What caused the Jeju Air disaster that claimed 179 lives, and what does it mean for aviation safety?  #SouthKorea #PlaneCrash #Aviation #DavidLearmount #BreakingNews

Transcript

00:00Well, something went very wrong with the airplane, we know that categorically, because the pilot

00:05did declare a mayday. He also made one attempt to land on this runway, and obviously decided

00:13that things were not going properly, so he went round again, and then decided to land

00:18on the same runway, but from the opposite direction. However, whatever it was that had

00:24gone wrong, possibly, we're talking, we've heard about bird strike, and possibly the

00:32failure of one engine, and possibly even an incipient fire in one of the engines, but

00:37the pilot had his hands full. When he finally came in to land, the final time, the aircraft

00:44was, it didn't have its undercarriage down, and I don't think that was an accident, I

00:49think they honestly couldn't put it down because there were probably no hydraulics, because

00:53of the damage that had been done by the bird strike, or whatever it was, and they also

00:57didn't have the flaps down, that's, those are the devices which enable the aircraft

01:01to land slowly. So the aircraft actually put down with no wheels, and very very fast, much

01:08faster than normal, and what happened was that it went down, it was a beautiful landing,

01:14given the circumstances, wings perfectly level, and it slid the full length of the runway,

01:20almost undamaged, and it went over the very end of the runway, and less than 200 metres

01:27beyond it, it hit a wall, and that caused the aeroplane to break up and burst into flames,

01:34it was the wall that killed everybody, not the landing, if that wall had not been there,

01:39everybody would be alive now. It does rather beg the question then, why there might be

01:45a wall at, admittedly, the extreme end of a runway? It does, it begs the question in

01:53a way which, I've never seen anything quite like this before, because the wall was obviously

01:58incredibly substantial, and it wasn't, it wasn't just a wall, the instrument landing

02:05system antennae, the aerials, which provide guidance to pilots in bad weather, to do precision

02:14approaches in bad weather, without being able to see the runway until the last minute,

02:20those aerials are normally just stuck into the ground, and they are collapsible, so if anybody

02:26does run over the end of the runway, and hits these aerials, very little damage is caused by

02:32them, but in this particular case, it looks as if the aerials were embedded in a concrete structure,

02:39which was the cause of the disaster at the end of this accident sequence.

02:46It's easy to think that planes are so highly automated and sophisticated,

02:52that they can almost fly themselves, clearly not.

02:56No, I'm afraid we're still going to need pilots for a while, because you see,

03:03what can, things can go wrong, you know, hitting a flock of birds, which we think was at least a

03:09part of the factor in this, it causes damage, it looks as in this case, it caused one engine to

03:16stop completely, and possibly to be very badly damaged, it might even have caused some damage

03:22to the other, giving the pilot less power, but when the pilot put the aircraft down, this aircraft

03:28down, although he didn't have the gear down, the undercarriage down, although he didn't have the

03:33flaps down, the touchdown itself was perfect, it was just very fast, and the aircraft skidded the

03:40full length of the runway on its belly, but you can survive that, aircraft often have, and it went

03:46off the end of the runway, and the disaster came, when it hit this really strong structure, solid

03:53structure, just off the end of the runway, right in the middle of the, you know, the extended

04:00centreline of the runway, I don't know what it was, a structure like that was doing there.

04:05David, I know we'll come back to this in the coming days and weeks, so many more questions

04:10to explore, for the moment, thank you, David Learmount, the consulting editor at Flight Global,

04:17and the expert on aviation.

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