I think you are overestimating these probabilities. I seem to remember Sully was forced into it and everything lined up just right that day. There was skill but also a lot of luck. With a nice long runway alongside that icy river and time to prepare the landing (which he had) I firmly believe Sully would have chosen differently.
Maybe, maybe not.
As these pilots demonstrated It is very hard to correctly estimate how to fly a hasty half of a traffic pattern, and arrive at the opposite runway end at the correct speed, altitude, and configuration to within the very tight tolerances required to touch down on the runway and stop on the runway.
If good fortune has presented you with an easy off-airport landing opportunity like a river or bay where there is zero precision required in managing your descent, rather than the extreme precision required to make a runway, the smarter (which is really the more mentally prepared = pre-rehearsed) pilot chooses the easier more likely to be successful option.
Sully showed the way, and a lot of us in the biz had our eyes opened by that.
Ground effect.
They aren’t the first or last crew to make that mistake. Haste is a terrible thing.
A question we don’t know is how much the birdstruck engine was creating either smoke and fumes in the cockpit or was creating great vibration of the whole airplane. Both of those things make calm deliberate action more challenging.
Wow. Another one of these! As LSL alluded to, there have been several over the decades (I can think of three previous ones). So sad.
Common enough that, before the information about the fuel cut-off switches came to light, I heard it posited by a former military pilot turned commercial pilot and YouTuber that the recent Air India crash could have been caused by the same (failure of one engine on takeoff, followed by shutting down the wrong engine).
As a conceptual matter yes the Air India event could have been a case of good engine/bad engine confusion. Before we knew better.
As a more practical matter, there is no training that places such urgency on switching off a malfunctioning engine that anyone would think to do it at that time. If we have an engine failure or fire during takeoff past reject speed it’ll be a minute-ish before we shut down the engine. It is far more urgent and important to get away from the ground, get roll, yaw, and heading under control, get somewhat accelerated, then take stock of the situation, then decide what to do, then do it.
The lightning reflex to instantly flip switches is pure Hollywood heroism and maybe WW-II. It’s sure not current practice.
Returning the the Jeu Air topic of this thread.
Ref @Monty’s cite to the news article , this is the Korean air safety agency page on this mishap and this is the Preliminary Report in English.
Surprisingly, the report contains none of the info revealed in the news article. Not that the article is wrong necessarily, but the source for the info about engine shutdowns seems to be more in the nature of a leak or a press release than in the report proper. Which is unusual.
The blunders started with a design change years before the airport opened in 2007. The original plans drawn up in 1999, and obtained by The Times, envisaged breakable foundations to anchor the antennas, known as localizers, on both ends of the runway. But at some point the design changed, and the private companies hired to build the airport used concrete.
Perhaps someone can provide a gift link:
Decades of Blunders Put a Lethal Wall at the End of a South Korean Runway
The New York Times identified a series of missteps that made a Jeju Air flight’s catastrophic end much more deadly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/world/asia/jeju-air-crash-south-korea-investigation.html
Shutting down the wrong engine worsened the Kegworth air crash in England.
I’ve watched 100 episodes or more of Smithsonian’s, “Air Disasters”, and my impression is that each nation independently sets the safety standards for commercial flight, and that there is no international standard to which all nations must adhere. I’ve also read that U.S. commercial flying is among the safest in the world. I think I’m seeing a connection here.
Yes each country can set its own standards. The International Civil Aviation Organisation has a set of recommended rules and procedures but there’s no requirement to follow any of it. The FAA and EASA are the big players when it comes to aircraft certification and the FAA rule set is used as a guide by some countries. Australia has been in the process of aligning the layout of its rules with the FAA but the actual rules themselves aren’t necessarily the same.
The goal is largely the same but everyone comes at it from a different angle.
Even when the rules are good there are cases where exemptions are available for when following a particular rule just isn’t practical. My home airport has minimal overrun at either end and it’s only about 1900m (6200ft) long. If you don’t stop by the runway end you either go into the sea or you plow through a highway, and then into the sea. A Jeju type accident here wouldn’t be good.
Who exactly decided that putting the runway on an isthmus so that it cuts off the two sides was a good idea?
The southern end has a tunnel under the stopway!
Ok, I guess there really isn’t a whole lot of flat land in the vicinity, but still…
The usual answer to that question it the land there was plenty spacious enough for the airplanes of the say when the airport was opened in 1940-something.
Then airplanes got bigger and faster, runways got longer, and development consumed all the other flat land sorta nearby.
It does seem like the southern end is mostly landfill, implying that it was extended. Would be interesting to trace the history.
At least they ran the roads around the runways as opposed to through, like Gibraltar.
Update from The Korea Times: Parliamentary probe into Jeju Air crash begins
The article is short, so I don’t want to run afoul of copyright. Read the rest of the article (three paragraphs of one sentence each).
I wonder what Parliament expects to learn that their dedicated accident investigation agency did not.
For sure it can be useful for the legislature to take an interest in something the safety folks, or more often the regulator, fails to tackle for political or cost reasons. A recent example in this country is Congress getting pissed at the FAA & the Army over their non-response to that RJ-helo midair near DCA.
Be nice if one of the outcomes here is a thorough audit of Korea’s airline airports looking for hazards that should not be near runways. Such as large berms. And even better if, once the audit is done, somebody appropriates the money to go fix the hazards promptly.
Whether Jeju Air (or other Korean carriers) need a thorough proctological exam is a different issue I’m curious about, but not one where I’m ready to offer an opinion.
Just noticed this in the OP. To be fair to FlightAware, the plane really did land (as in, touched down on the runway) at about this time, and ADS-B transmissions would have so indicated. As for taxi time, it’s not unusual for FlightAware to use estimates when the source data isn’t available. For example, ADS-B transmissions aren’t available to any of their stations on most of the overseas portion of transatlantic flights, so the flight status information they display is what the plane should be doing and not what it actually is doing.
As you suggest, they’re likely looking at “cause” from a regulatory standpoint rather than a technical one.
They are also looking for evidence of interference in the accident investigation.