South Korea Jet Crash Kills 179

International investigators worked to pinpoint what caused the fiery crash of a South Korean passenger plane that killed nearly all of the 181 people on board, in one of the deadliest aviation disasters in years.

The aircraft skidded off the runway, collided with a concrete barrier and burst into flames as it attempted to land Sunday at an airport in Muan County, in the country's southwest, just after 9 a.m. local time. The plane, operated by South Korea's Jeju Air, was a Boeing 737-800, a workhorse of commercial air travel.

Shortly before landing, the control tower warned of a possible bird strike and the Jeju Air pilots issued a mayday. Aviation safety experts said a severe bird strike could disable both engines as well as mechanical systems used to lower landing gear. Videos showed the jet's landing gear wasn't deployed as the plane skidded down the runway.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said on Sunday it was leading a team of U.S. investigators that included representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration, which certified the aircraft, and Boeing. The safety board will be assisting officials from South Korea in their probe.

The black boxes have been recovered from the plane, and investigators plan to sift through flight data and cockpit voice recorders for answers.

Once the blaze was extinguished, all that remained visible of the Boeing 737 was the tail of the aircraft-with a single charred wing angled to the sky.

There were just two survivors: a pair of flight attendants. One recalled buckling into a seat at the rear of the plane and touching ground before losing consciousness, according to South Korea's semiofficial Yonhap News Agency, citing local hospital officials.

"What happened?" the flight attendant asked a doctor, Yonhap reported. The attendant sustained a fractured left shoulder and head injuries but was conscious. The other flight attendant was transferred to a hospital.

Accident investigators will likely focus on the apparent bird strike, its effects on the airliner's engines and why the pilots didn't lower the plane's landing gear, aviation safety experts said.

John Cox, a 737 pilot and aviation safety consultant, said the investigators will likely look at whether birds disabled one or both of the jet's engines as well as the size and number of birds that were ingested.

They will likely assess how much "bird residue" is found in the engines' cores, Cox said, and depending on the probe's findings the accident could prompt an assessment of certification standards for bird strikes on engines.

"The airplane will fly just fine on one engine and the crews are trained for that," Cox said. "Typically you take time to go out and fly, get all the checklists done. They didn't do that. They kind of went straight to the runway which makes me question about the second engine-was it operating or not?" Dozens of bodies were moved Sunday to a temporary morgue, where they awaited family members for identification, local authorities said.

At the airport, families crowded into a conference room and the terminal's waiting areas where they got a briefing from the local fire department and waited for further updates. Some dropped to the floor in tears. In a roughly two-minute briefing with reporters on Sunday, Kim E-bae, the CEO of Jeju Air, apologized to victims and their families, promising the company would do its best to support them. He said the plane had no history of accidents and that no abnormalities were detected during maintenance inspections before takeoff.

Boeing said it was in contact with and stands ready to support Jeju Air. "We extend our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones, and our thoughts remain with the passengers and crew," Boeing said.

At 8:57 a.m., the control tower at Muan International Airport warned of a bird strike to the plane, according to the country's transport ministry. Two minutes later a pilot declared mayday. With control-tower permission, the Jeju Air plane sought to land.

And at 9:03 a.m. it crashed.

At least one passenger had been texting with a family member in the minutes before, according to local media, which took a photo of a phone that showed the exchange.

"Should I write a will?" one of the messages reads.

The Jeju Air plane had descended without the apparent deployment of its landing gear or flaps, which are movable surfaces on the wings that would allow the jet to slow during a typical landing, according to footage aired on South Korean TV networks.

The head Jeju Air pilot had more than 6,800 hours of flight experience and had held his current role since March 2019; the co-pilot had roughly 1,650 hours in the cockpit, according transport ministry to South Korea's Losing two engines due to bird strikes is rare but has happened-notably with the "Miracle on the Hudson" flight that landed on the river between Manhattan and New Jersey in 2009.

"It limits the choices a lot" for pilots to resolve the emergency, said Cox, the aviation safety consultant. "But it's really rare. The engines will typically tolerate a fair amount of birds." The Boeing 737-800-a predecessor of the 737 MAX-is one of the safest airplanes ever built, and an inability to lower the landing gear would be rare and have backstops, such as procedures or checklists to follow if there had been a deployment failure, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former senior accident investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.

"If there was a failure there, why not continue to fly, burn off fuel so you don't have a lot of fuel on board?" Guzzetti said. "You call emergency rescue crews to be ready for you.

I don't see any of that there." The Muan International Airport is also surrounded by various bodies of water, meaning the pilots could have opted for a safer sea landing, said Hiroshi Sugie, a former Japan Airlines pilot.

The pilots appear to have landed in the most dangerous way, Sugie said. "There are just too many errors here," he said.

"A belly landing isn't something you rush into doing." The South Korean crash caps a tumultuous year for an airline industry that has recovered from the doldrums of the pandemic, though carriers have been left scrambling to replenish staffing and manufacturers struggling to match the bounceback in demand. A passenger jet headed for Russia crashed in Kazakhstan last week, drawing an apology from President Vladimir Putin of Russia over the "tragic incident." Jeju Air is a budget carrier that was founded in 2005. It operates about 40 aircraft and handled more than 12 million passengers in 2023, according to its website.

The Jeju Air crash ranks among the deadliest aviation incidents in recent years. In March 2022, a China Eastern Airlines plane slammed into a mountainside and killed all 132 people aboard, with flight data indicating the crash was caused intentionally, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some 176 people died on a Ukraine International Airlines flight in January 2020, with Iranian officials later admitting the plane had been shot down unintentionally by its armed forces outside Tehran. Boeing's 737 MAX jets were grounded worldwide in 2019 for nearly two years, after a pair of crashes together took 346 lives.

The airliner tragedy comes during a period of political upheaval in South Korea.

That thrust Choi Sang-mok, No. 3 in line and a deputy prime minister, into the nation's top job. Visiting the crash site, he declared the region a special disaster zone, allowing the disbursement of state support funds.