179 killed, two survive South Korean plane crash
The U.S. NTSB is leading a team that includes investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, the aircraft’s manufacturer.
December 29, 2024 at 6:36 p.m. EST
Written by Kelly Kasulis Cho, Ian Duncan and Leo Sands
SEOUL — Investigators were working to understand why a passenger plane crashed at a South Korean airport on Sunday, killing all but two people aboard in the world’s deadliest plane crash in six years.
One hundred and seventy-nine people died, the country’s National Fire Agency confirmed. Two members of the crew survived, the agency said.
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Authorities said the flight crew was warned about birds in the area, but analysts said it would be exceptionally rare for a strike to force a large passenger plane into a fiery crash-landing like Sunday’s.
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All but two of the 181 people aboard a Jeju Air flight were killed when the plane crash-landed at a South Korean airport on Dec. 29. (Video: Naomi Schanen/The Washington Post)
Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok crash-landed at Muan International Airport near the southern tip of South Korea and burst into a fireball at around 9 a.m. local time.
Video showed the Boeing 737-800 veering down the runway without its landing gear deployed, hitting a wall and bursting into flames.
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Photos of the smoking wreckage showed only the plane’s charred tail intact. Two crew members, a woman in her 30s and a man in his 20s, were transferred to a hospital in Seoul, authorities said.
Rescuers search the crash site. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)
The pilot issued a Mayday alert about two minutes before the crash, according to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. Investigators are examining communications from the aircraft, ministry officials told reporters Sunday. Authorities have not given a cause for the crash, but they said the airport’s control tower warned the plane of the potential for a bird strike minutes before the crash. They rejected speculation that the airport’s 9,200-foot runway was too short and contributed to the disaster.
The ministry said two black boxes — one with flight data, one with voice recordings from the cockpit — had been collected from the scene of the crash.
Analysts at aviation site Flightradar24 said their data suggested the pilots might have been trying to fly past the airport to allow crews on the ground to determine whether their landing gear had failed to deploy. The site’s data does not cover the moments immediately before the crash.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former investigator for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said it was highly improbable that a bird strike by itself would cause such a catastrophic crash. The pilots might not have realized their landing gear was not down, he said. Pilots on modern aircraft can deploy it manually if their hydraulic systems fail, and Guzzetti said flaps on the plane’s wing weren’t extended, as would be expected if they were attempting an emergency landing on the jet’s belly, and the airport doesn’t appear to have made preparations.
“This is a tough one,” Guzzetti said. “It’s a tough one to watch on video, and it’s a tough one to piece together on what we know.”
If birds damaged both engines, aviation safety consultant John Cox said, the crew might not have had time to properly prepare to land.
“It has happened, but it is extraordinarily rare,” Cox said. He pointed to the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson,” in which pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River along New York City after the engines lost power in a bird strike.
The NTSB is leading a team that includes investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing to work alongside South Korean investigators, the agency said.
South Korea’s acting president, Choi Sang-mok, said he was praying for the victims. “As the person acting on behalf of the office responsible for the life and safety of our citizens, I am terribly sorry and heartbroken beyond words,” he said in a statement.
The government has declared a week of national mourning, during which officials will wear ribbons, flags at public buildings will be lowered to half-staff and memorials will be established. Choi instructed government agencies to be transparent in their investigations.
The United States is ready to help, President Joe Biden said in statement.
The crash surpassed the crash of Voepass Flight 2283, which killed 62 people in Brazil in August, as the deadliest of the year, according to a database maintained by the Flight Safety Foundation. It’s the deadliest since 2018’s Lion Air Flight 610 plunged into the Java Sea in the Indonesian archipelago, killing all eight crew members and 181 passengers on board.
The Indonesia crash and one in Ethiopia months later led to concerns about a system on the Boeing 737 Max airliner and a worldwide grounding that threw the manufacturer into crisis. But Cox said Sunday’s crash, involving a workhorse older model of 737 and an airline with a strong reputation for safety, probably will be determined to have been an anomaly.
“But we need to understand why so we can do everything we can to prevent a recurrence,” he said.
Search and rescue at scene of South Korean plane crash
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Nearly all 181 people on a Jeju Air flight were presumed dead after crash-landing at South Korea's Muan International Airport on Dec. 29, fire authorities said. (Video: Reuters)
Earlier Sunday, senior Jeju Air executive Song Kyung-hoon said he would not speculate on the cause of the crash before the investigation was complete, but he ruled out the possibility that poor aircraft maintenance played any role. Song said the airline has submitted all relevant information to the Transportation Ministry, the semiofficial Yonhap News Agency reported. The airline said the aircraft was 15 years old.
One of the surviving crew members told rescuers that an engine began smoking after a suspected bird strike before exploding, Yonhap reported.
Bird strikes are relatively common and can cause significant damage, but they rarely cause crashes. The FAA logged roughly 285,000 bird strikes between 1990 and 2023 involving U.S. aircraft. In only 5 percent of cases was any negative impact on flight reported. Forty-nine cases were reported to have caused the destruction of an aircraft.
Boeing said it was in contact with Jeju Air. “We extend our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones, and our thoughts remain with the passengers and crew,” it said in a statement on social media.
On board were 175 passengers and six crew members. One hundred and seventy-three were from Korea; two were from Thailand.
Bodies were transferred to a temporary morgue near the airport, according to authorities, who were working into the night to formally identify the remains. On Sunday evening, the fire agency said it had identified at least 88 of the victims.
Video aired on South Korean broadcasters showed thick, dark plumes of smoke rising from the mangled plane as firefighters and emergency workers surrounded the scene. The airport, along the country’s west coast in South Jeolla province, is about a three-hour drive west of the major port city of Busan.
The crash prompted an all-out emergency response that included the deployment of special forces troops as well as hundreds of emergency responders. Authorities extinguished the fire within 43 minutes.
A person rescued from the plane crash at Muan International Airport is transported to a nearby hospital. (Yonhap/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Choi is just beginning to assume his presidential duties after South Korean lawmakers voted to impeach acting president Han Duck-soo on Friday. Han replaced President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was impeached this month for declaring martial law.
Jeju Air, established in 2005 as a venture between a major firm and the provincial government in South Korea’s Jeju Island, is one of South Korea’s largest low-cost airlines.
In 2023, the Transportation Ministry gave Jeju Air an A rating, meaning “very good,” on a four-point scale from B+ to A++.
South Korea last suffered a large-scale aviation disaster in 1997, when a Korean Air flight slammed into a hilly peak in the U.S. territory of Guam, killing 228 of the 254 people aboard. In 1993, 68 of 116 passengers on an Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul to Mokpo, South Korea, were killed.
Duncan reported from Washington and Sands from London. Jintak Han in Seoul contributed to this report.
By Kelly Kasulis Cho ...
Kelly Kasulis Cho is a breaking news reporter and editor at The Washington Post, based in Seoul. Previously, she spent four years covering North and South Korea as a freelance foreign correspondent, and she has also worked at the New York Times and Bloomberg BNA. Follow her on Twitter: @KasulisK.follow on X@kasulisk
By Ian Duncan ...
Ian Duncan is a reporter covering federal transportation agencies and the politics of transportation. He previously worked at the Baltimore Sun for seven years, covering city hall, the military and criminal justice. He was part of the Sun's team covering Freddie Gray's death in 2015 and then-Mayor Catherine Pugh's Healthy Holly books scandal.follow on X@iduncan
By Leo Sands ...
Leo Sands is a breaking-news reporter and editor in The Washington Post’s London Hub, covering news as it unfolds around the world. follow on Xleo_sands
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