# Jeju Air plane crashes in Muan, South Korea
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [December 29, 2024, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291 "2024-12-29T03:41:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 5
### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 7:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/81 "2025-01-02T07:12:51Z")
For the sake of argument–
Suppose (with the benefit of hindsight) you’re in the position these pilots were in, seemingly committed to a landing with no gear, flaps, slats, or thrust reversers. And you’ve lost 1/3 of the runway as well.
What do you do to maximize your chances of survival? My thinking is that you really want to go for a “carrier landing”; just really smoosh that plane into the runway. Maximize the contact patch, keep the nose down, and minimize any time in ground effect.
They had to have known they were fast, and that even with working gear it would be cutting it close. But this also doesn’t seem like something you simulate for…
---
### Author:  [@Al128](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Al128)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/82 "2025-01-02T10:52:53Z")
… And running back into the tail section…
---
### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/83 "2025-01-02T12:48:08Z")
As with most bad outcomes, the earlier you figure out your plan isn’t working the better the odds of success with a revised plan.
From a mile out on final they could have chosen to simply aim for the bay just past the far end of the runway. Which was several miles long and conveniently aligned. From downwind where their problem apparently began with a bang they could have gone straight north also into the water. Albeit with more obstacles and a bit of inconveniently placed land that might have been in just the wrong spot; but probably not.
Heck, depending on how high, and even more, how _fast_ they were when they crossed the runway threshold they still could have simply held off the runway by 20 or 50 feet and coasted the length of the airport losing speed then been out over the bay. Once the speed is down to near an appropriate touchdown speed for the (non) flaps they had, go ahead and descend the last few feet into the water. Conveniently the avionics display a guide for that speed all the time with no fiddling required. Even with only emergency battery power.
If we assume what I think is your actual scenario: there isn’t convenient water anywhere and we figure out real late that we’re over (or about to be over) a runway that’s rapidly disappearing. So now how to we best stop? In that case I agree w your thinking. Clunk it on with little to no flare and get the drag going early. The procedure manual for normal landings says the same thing. If you find yourself (a little) high or fast, far better to clunk it on and get slowing than glide along in the air while slowing. Said another way, you’ll burn far more distance in the air than on the ground for any given amount of slowing. So the basic idea of “stuff it onto the runway” ought to be fairly top-of-mind to any pilot who’s close to touchdown but fast. Even stupid-fast.
But here’s an even better plan: Offset to one side or the other and put it in the grass / mud / dirt alongside the runway. The stopping will be much better there, at the near-certainty of tearing the airplane apart. OTOH, going off the end into e.g. a big wall or a city or a ravine is an _absolute_ certainty of tearing the airplane apart.
Even if you don’t figure out the no-hope-of-stopping problem until maybe 50 feet altitude, you can still turn a smidgen to slide off the side early. From 100 feet there’s probably time to complete the shallow S-turn to offset over the grass then re-align with the runway.
This comes back around to something I’ve said in the GA thread about various GA accidents. You need to have made the mental commitment years ago that, _in extremis_, you will deliberately wreck the airplane to save the people and yourself. And renew that vow regularly so it’ll be top enough of mind when you need it.
Sully had made that decision a long time before the day he parked his Airbus in the Hudson. It was interesting in the aftermath how many pilots and training departments suddenly developed an interest in thinking about off-airport landings. A topic that had been utterly taboo except in the context of a mid-ocean ditching. Maybe not so much taboo as simply unthinkable / unworthy of thinking about.
To your point about simulating, there was a brief and very _un_official effort at my carrier post-Sully to take a few minutes of slack simulator time and play with various low altitude total engine failures and where and how could you save the day with some Yeagertastic maneuvering back to a runway at the big airport you just launched from. Pretty quickly TPTB got wind of that and it was squelched. I was lucky enough to get some of that during its brief run. As monkey-see-monkey-do training they were right: this encouraged delusions of John Wayne. As an eye-opening few minutes’ intro into engineless crash landings in fast planes it was IMO a valuable consciousness-raising.
Were I driving that 737 that day would the outcome have been better? I sure hope so, but honestly: maybe, maybe not. Anyone can get fixated and do an increasingly long list of ever dumber stuff implementing a bad and getting worse plan. It appears from the early info that that’s what happened to these guys. If they could do it over, they’d probably do it differently, and with much less tendency to fixation.
Good bet all the Jeju pilots are thinking about that. At least the skilled ones are. Any of them who are simply glorified streetcar motormen won’t understand the problem, much less the solution. This last applies all across the airline industry regardless of employer or airplane type.
---
### Author:  [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/84 "2025-01-02T13:44:23Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#):
>
> If the captain is just bore-sighted on aiming the jet at the runway regardless of all other considerations and the FO is a enough more aware of the bigger picture to see that this is impossible, then the FO needs to be forcefully saying to go around.
>
> Do something, anything, to break the other pilot’s bore-sight. Talking. Reciting the parameters we’re in. e.g. “We’re 5 miles out at 9000 feet. We can’t possibly land”. A tap on the shoulder. A firm whack on the arm. shouting F\*\*\*ing profanities at the other person. Including taking full control yourself under the procedures for that.
>
> There are cultures where saying something that amounts to “Hey Boss, you’re screwing up badly; do _this_ instead of _that_. Now!” is socially difficult to impossible. Despite their Western-written procedure books telling them to, it just won’t happen, or won’t happen early enough often enough.
Korean culture features a high power distance: a subordinate suggesting that his superior might be making a bad decision can only be done very indirectly and diplomatically. When the superior doesn’t get the hint, the plane crashes. Korean Air Lines used to have a crappy safety record, with poor cockpit crew coordination being cited as a factor in many of their crashes. In the late '90s and 2000’s they made a concerted effort to enforce the tenets of CRM among their cockpit crews, and now their safety record is among the best.
A failure of CRM was similarly cited in **[the 2014 crash of Asiana 214](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214)**.
Jeju Air’s record is pretty good, but they’re not as big as Korean Air (40 planes vs. 167), and they haven’t been around as long (19 years vs. 62 years), so they haven’t rolled the dice as many times as Korean Air; it may be that they’ve just gotten lucky so far.
---
### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/85 "2025-01-02T13:51:52Z")
Good point.
Note that my quoted comments were directed at the Pakistani A320 mishap that was a brief sidebar in this thread. But as you say, they have universal applicability.
---
### Author:  [@3AxisCtrl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/3AxisCtrl)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/86 "2025-01-02T14:03:38Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#):
>
> Suppose (with the benefit of hindsight) you’re in the position these pilots were in, seemingly committed to a landing with no gear, flaps, slats, or thrust reversers. And you’ve lost 1/3 of the runway as well.
(Speaking as a glider pilot with ~70 off-airport landings:)
Losing 1/3 of the runway could be the difference between “more or less survivable” and “complete disaster”. It seems clear flight controls were working, so they could have added drag by slipping (e.g. left aileron + right rudder). In an emergency, rules against flying low over a runway-extension construction project don’t apply.
They’d probably have done better to land next to the runway rather than on it (softer surface = more friction). And, as LSLGuy suggests, a water/mud landing would have been much preferable…
I fully grant that working these things out under pressure would have been difficult.
---
### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/87 "2025-01-02T14:30:07Z")
> [@Monty](#):
>
> > [@Velocity](#):
> >
> > The pilots may have thought a wheels-up belly-scraping landing was the only Hail Mary chance to stop the plane.
>
> My question here is from a non-pilot perspective. If that were the case, then wouldn’t the pilots have requested and the aiport have prepared the runway for that, something like foaming the runway?
>
> Jeju Air is a budget carrier, so there may have been some corner-cutting. I’m starting to wonder if they had enough fuel to engulf the plane after a crash, but not enough fuel for the required reserve for go arounds.
I missed this the first time.
The operating assumption here is they had just a handful of minutes from when the problem started until they landed. Even if there was something that folks on the ground could have done, there would be no time.
Further, runway foaming was something that pretty well went away in the 1980s as useless. In this instant case, even if it did have any fire suppressive power, it’d have the offsetting disadvantage of increasing, not decreasing, the sliding distance.
As to go-arounds and fuel … you’re surely right it takes very little fuel to create a very impressive fire. But (AFAIK) as best anyone understands their predicament, both engines were failed. Fuel supply is immaterial and go arounds are inapplicable when you have no running engines.
The absence of running engines is also what forced the pace of landing very, very soon after the problem started.
Again all the above is still guesswork until more reliable info is released by the authorities.
---
### Author:  [@3AxisCtrl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/3AxisCtrl)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2025, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/88 "2025-01-02T23:25:15Z")
Recent reports mention some things I hadn’t previously heard: the 737 had been cleared to land on Runway 01, and the pilots had _extended the landing gear_. So one of the first things they did after the birdstrike was retract the gear. They touched down on Runway 19 just 3 minutes later - a remarkably short time for a downwind / base / final pattern.
---
### Author:  [@ASL\_v2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ASL_v2.0)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2025, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/89 "2025-01-03T02:36:38Z")
Sharing this video from YouTube channel Pilot Debrief. Nothing new, but it’s about 20 minutes and seems a good summary of what’s known (and not known) so far:
[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EgD7urF9Q)
One bit of informed speculation offered is that perhaps the pilot had initiated a go around just before he bird strike for an unrelated reason, which could explain why the plane had too much velocity to land directly after the bird strike.
---
### Author:  [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2025, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/90 "2025-01-05T06:18:10Z")
I’ve read that they have, or will very soon have, the cockpit voice audio taken from the CVR and then, presumably, a transcript.
Will any or all of the transcript be released to the public immediately? A day or a week after that? After the final accident report is released? Never?
I’d guess “it depends” would be the answer for now, but does anyone have an educated guess?
---
### Author:  [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2025, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/91 "2025-01-05T06:23:24Z")
In fact, they’ve already extracted the audio and are nearly done with the transcript.
> **[South Korea: Fatal crash cockpit transcript almost complete – DW – 01/04/2025](https://www.dw.com/en/south-korea-fatal-crash-cockpit-transcript-almost-complete/a-71215372)**
>
> Investigators of the Jeju Air crash are close to completing the conversion of the cockpit voice recorder from audio to text in the hope it may provide more clues as to what caused the aviation disaster.
Can’t speak to the second half of the question, as it’s no doubt dependent on process. But thought you’d be interested in the cite re the first part.
---
### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2025, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/92 "2025-01-05T15:16:30Z")
In US accident investigation procedure the entire transcript would be part of the final report. A US preliminary report might contain factual statements derived from the transcript or from investigators listening to the tapes. e.g. “The pilots mentioned snakes in the (expletive deleted) cockpit.”
This is a Korean investigation run by the Koreans per their own laws and regulations & procedures. Which might nor might not be similar. We’ll have to wait and see what their investigative bureau releases in press releases and the prelim report.
---
### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2025, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/93 "2025-01-05T15:38:24Z")
> [@Monty](#):
>
> [Shades of Hachikō](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2025/01/281_389576.html)…(the link goes to _The Korea Times_.)
>
> > Pet dog Pudding rescued by animal rights group after losing family in Jeju Air tragedy
> >
> > A dog named Pudding, orphaned after losing its family in the recent Jeju Air crash, has been rescued by an animal rights organization.
What a sweetie! At least the fact that he’s being cared for and will undoubtedly end up in a good home is a little snippet of good news in the midst of tragedy.
---
### Author:  [@jnglmassiv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jnglmassiv)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2025, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/94 "2025-01-07T20:39:40Z")
In the wake of this accident, S Korea’s Transport Minister, Park Sang-woo, has announced his resignation.
---
### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2025, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/95 "2025-01-07T20:53:21Z")
Which suggests that what evidence the investigators have uncovered is not very glorious.
---
### Author:  [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2025, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/96 "2025-01-07T21:54:59Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#):
>
> Which suggests that what evidence the investigators have uncovered is not very glorious.
I wouldn’t assume that, although it’s probably true. Korea has a “fall on one’s sword” culture when it comes to perception of failure, whether or not the person is actually a fault.
---
### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2025, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/97 "2025-01-11T16:08:13Z")
South Korean authorities have announced that both of the “black boxes” in the plane – the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder – ceased to record about four minutes before the crash landing. After initially examining the recorders, and discovering that data were missing, the Koreans worked with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which confirmed that the data were missing.
It is not yet known why the boxes ceased recording.
> **[Black boxes from South Korea plane crash failed to record final 4 minutes,...](https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-jeju-crash-boeing-black-boxes-b945e823723516a0f76120fdd7e566e4)**
>
> Officials say the black boxes of a Boeing jetliner that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording about four minutes before the accident.
---
### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2025, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/98 "2025-01-11T16:13:42Z")
As a general matter the flight data recorder is powered by the AC generators powered by the engines. Ditto the voice recorder. If both engines quit, there’s no electricity to power them. There’s also no electricity powering most of the systems that would provide data to them, so that’s not the forehead-slapping oversight it at first seems.
Armed with more time, the pilots could have started the APU to provide AC electricity again after a 1-2 minute startup period.
But if they were at low altitude with both engines out, they had more urgent issues to attend to. In clear weather the plane is perfectly flyable without electricity indefinitely. But without engines “indefinitely” will necessarily be short. And busy; very busy.
I’ll note that both FDR & CVR quitting more or less simultaneously is highly suggestive of dual engine failure, but far short of conclusive. But that remains my own personal working hypothesis for all the unseemly haste and seemingly poor decision-making which followed.
---
### Author:  [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2025, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/99 "2025-01-11T16:44:29Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#):
>
> But that remains my own personal working hypothesis for all the unseemly haste and seemingly poor decision-making which followed.
I have an admittedly non-professional opinion that mirrors your, except I would be inclined to use the word “panicked” in context.
---
### Author:  [@Pedro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pedro)
#### Post date: [January 12, 2025, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291/100 "2025-01-12T16:31:43Z")
What are the plausible explanations to lose the last 4 minutes of the CVR and FDR? Even if they lost or mistakenly shut down both engines, the black boxes are going to continue to run on battery power.
[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291.md?page=4)
[Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jeju-air-plane-crashes-in-muan-south-korea/1012291.md?page=6)