I understand that. The point was that without flaps extended, they would have needed significantly higher airspeed to get airborne.
According to this,
The Muan airport normally has a 9,200-foot-long runway. But when the Jeju Air plane was landing, only 8,200 feet of it was usable because of construction work underway to extend the runway. (Still, this is long enough for landing 737-800s, officials say.)
The purpose of holding is normally either to burn fuel down to max landing weight (not a factor here), or to complete emergency checklists.
From info I’ve seen around the web there was only about 7 or 8 minutes between going around from their first approach to runway 01 to landing on runway 19. That suggests a very rushed tight reposition to the other runway. They had, or thought they had, a serious emergency requiring an immediate landing.
So they were working to make the runway longer, even though it’s already long enough. In fact, it’s long enough even when they shortened it to make it longer.
(Yeah, a 737 is small as airliners go. Bigger, heavier planes need a longer runway.)
Yep. And the first step of building a tall building is to dig a hole. Go figure. 
Maybe a factor was similar to the lack of communication in that Pakistan crash after a botched go-around in which an engine scraped the runway. One pilot assumed they were going around (and so he raised the gear), while the other was determined to land (after a too-fast descent, both vertically and horizontally).
Maybe the pilots were disabled in some way.
I read somewhere that the wall may have been a “blast wall” in an earlier airport version and was seen as a handy place to put the antenna when the runways were extended.
In that crash (Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303), the gear was never extended (and thus not retracted) prior to the “scrape engines on runway” event. It was extended later - and the associated extra drag might have been the reason the (now-powerless) plane could not quite reach the airfield.
Which is another demonstration of the difficulty of managing a powerless approach and touchdown (can’t quite call it a “landing”) in a big jet. Figuring out whether and when to add drag is all guesswork with few guidelines. Meanwhile, to stop on a runway you need to get to the right spot in space with the right speed and configuration to fairly tight tolerances.
Good luck getting that right enough on your first try.
The gear was down for the start of the first approach then selected up at about five miles.
From the final report:
At 09:15:38 UTC, descent for Approach was initiated. Flight was cleared for an Instrument Landing System (ILS) Approach Runway (R/W) 25L. Aircraft altitude was around 9,000 feet (ft) instead of 3,000 ft at 15 Nautical Mile (NM) from touchdown. Speed Brakes and Landing Gears were extended. Aircraft was significantly above the published vertical approach path. Around 5 NM from the touchdown, both Speed Brakes and Landing Gears were retracted. Several Warnings, cockpit indications and Air Traffic Control (ATC) instructions were disregarded by flight crew and the Unstabilized Approach was continued.
Wonder if this all came down to pilot assumptions about the brakes being in working order. If the wheel brakes worked, then the plane could have landed and braked itself hard on the runway. But if the pilots assumed the brakes would not work, then a wheeled landing would only let the plane roll even more efficiently and kill all hopes of bringing the plane to a timely stop. The pilots may have thought a wheels-up belly-scraping landing was the only Hail Mary chance to stop the plane.
There are plenty of back-up braking systems on the 737. And precious little in the way of inflight warnings that the brakes won’t work on touchdown. Unless a lot of other stuff has failed too and it’s obvious damned near nothing is going to work. So that’s not a real plausible line of inquiry IMO.
All of this (the Korean 737 crash, not the Pakistan A320 that’s the side bar in a few posts above) is quite mysterious to me. They transitioned from an apparently normal situation into a mad dash to land ASAP without proper gear and flaps. For some reason that remains pure speculation AFAIK.
I admit I have not pursued YouTube, nor pprune on this one. My interest in the event is insufficient to motivate me to slog through their large noise to ferret out their small signal.
According to The Korea Times, Jeju Air has lost about 70,000 passengers in the wake of this incident. Let me put it another way, quoting the article:
The tragic crash of a passenger jet — operated by Jeju Air — is feared to spark a spree of air ticket cancellations for other low-cost carriers (LCCs) amid customers’ growing distrust in the safety of budget carriers, industry officials said Tuesday.
Some 70,000 Jeju Air flight tickets were canceled a day after the accident on Sunday, apparently due to escalating woes over the safety of the Boeing 737-800 jetliner. Jeju Air relies on the model to operate most of its domestic and international flights.
And the traveling public does not seem to appreciate the Boeing 737-800 now. (From the same article)
Of particular concern is not just Jeju Air but other LCCs — such as Jin Air and T’way Air — which might also sustain damages in the aftermath of the tragedy, as the overall corporate image of budget carriers has been seriously tarnished, aviation industry officials said.
“As most LCCs operate the same Boeing 737-800 jets, (there are) concerns over the customers’ growing distrust of the model, which will result in an earnings fall to budget carriers here,” an official from the aviation industry said.
For now, some 100 738-800 aircraft are operated by most LCCs here. Jeju Air tops the list with 39 737-800 jets, followed by 27 from T’way Air and 19 from Jin Air.
There will be a major holiday in Korea called 설날 (Seol-nal) observed for three days this year, 28~30 January; in China it is the Spring Festival observed 28 January~3 February; in Vietnam, it is Tết observed the same dates as the Spring Festival. These are popular dates to travel. Wikipedia has a list of Jeju Air destinations.
The traveling public canceling their Jeju Air flights for those dates is like everyone who had booked a flight on Thanksgiving for one airline for the four-day Thanksgiving weekend canceling those flights.
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.
You are right - I was wrong.
I thought I recalled a report that said no gear extension, but your link makes it clear there was. Which makes the crash even stranger: needing an extremely steep approach for a successful landing, they retracted both speedbrakes and gear.
That bespeaks two pilots with different plans. One is trying to land, the other is trying to go around. And they’re not effectively communicating that discrepancy to each other.
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.
In those cases, maybe an act of insubordination, like raising the gear, might be an oblique way of accomplishing the same thing. If the bore-sighted Captain even notices the gear coming up.
In the Pakistan case, gear up or down the approach was utterly unsalvageable. Such that the gear retraction “signal”, if that’s what it was, was also too little too late to break the Captain’s bore-sight. And the FO, evidently out of ideas on how to prevent the unfolding accident, sat there through the rest of the disastrous evolution.
Back to Korea, I found this article from the NYT offers interesting details (gift link, but no preview). From the article (bolding mine):
Around 8:57 a.m., [the crash was 9:01 or 9:02, depending on the sources - Pardel Lux] I heard bangs. They sounded like incomplete combustion from motorbikes but louder and unfamiliar. I often hear guns being fired to chase away the birds, as well as noise from different construction work. But never have I heard that kind of banging noise. I thought it was strange, so I left my kitchen and went outside to the restaurant parking lot and looked up at the sky.
I saw the airplane. It was above my restaurant instead of over the runway. And the plane was tilted a bit to the right. It looked to me like the plane was about to make a landing, only toward my restaurant rather than toward the runway. I have never before seen a plane fly so low and over my restaurant at that. I went to the back of my restaurant to watch the back of the plane.
The plane was higher in the sky than when I watched it earlier, and as it ascended, it was making a circle toward the right, doing a U-turn. It felt like this circle was a really small one. I felt that there was something definitely wrong with this plane and that I should take a video. That’s why I walked up to the rooftop.
On the rooftop, I shot the first video.
Very, very interesting, thanks for that. It’s just incredible how much we can know so quickly. We saw the missile punctures from the other crash a few days ago. Today, we hear from the guy in earshot of the what’s probably going to turn out to be the engine(s) rotating for the last time. Then, he videoed the rest.
From the Korea Times story quoted by @Monty:
I was curious whether the carriers mentioned were all over the world or just in Korea. The article seems only to be about Korean low-cost carriers, not any others elsewhere. Still, no doubt an accident like this doesn’t do nifty things for Spirit, Ryanair, or the like.
Shades of Hachikō…(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.
The animal rights group, Care, said Wednesday that it had rescued Pudding, who had been wandering alone in a village in Yeonggwang County, South Jeolla Province.
&
After the tragedy, Pudding wandered between the family home and the village center, observing cars and buses as if searching for its family. Concerned villagers, moved by Pudding’s plight, began feeding the dog in the absence of its lost caretakers.
Care described their encounter with Pudding: “We found Pudding sitting quietly outside the village hall. When we approached, it ran toward us with excitement, as if still waiting for its family.”
More at the link.
So the Koreans aren’t satisfied with the U.S. approach of a preliminary report which says very little and a detailed report after at least a year.