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As reported on December 30th, 2024, Jeju Air 2216 crashed at South Korea’s Muan International Airport. The Boeing 737-800 apparently suffered at least one engine failure due to a bird strike and the subsequent emergency landing resulted in the aircraft striking a reinforced structure that killed all those aboard apart from 2 crew members in the rear of the aircraft. The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) were both recovered and upon analysis by the NTSB, it was discovered that the last four minutes of the flight were not recorded, indicating a catastrophic electrical failure.
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This means that all the conversations between the pilots after the go around will remain a mystery, but the fact that there is complete electrical failure seems to indicate that both engines sustained some sort of damage from the birdstrike. Further analysis of the video seems to suggest that the left engine may have been hit at the same time as the right engine. What is unclear is whether the birdstrike occurred before or after the go around was initiated. If before the go around, the outcome of this event would likely have been a safe landing.
If the pilots made the decision on final to go around to avoid the flock of birds, but were unsuccessful and ingested birds in both engines, during the go around, it would partially explain the configuration on landing. Air traffic data shows a normal go around rate of climb initially, followed by a rapid decent, indicating they were unable to climb as planned, likely due to a second failed engine. Whether they shutdown the engine or the engine seized, there was no apparent thrust being produced upon landing, according to the videos.
What followed the aborted go around and return to the airfield for a partial powered landing was without doubt littered with pilot errors. The go around procedure would have called for a partial retraction of the flaps and full retraction of the gear, so there is no explanation for the apparent flaps up landing. The pilot’s maneuver seems to have misjudged the landing pattern for his altitude and airspeed at the time of the second engine failure resulting in the aircraft being well above normal glidepath.
Without the CVR, we will never know what actions the pilots intended to take, only the resulting actions that did occur. They may in fact have attempted to put down gear and flaps, but without hydraulics they would not have deployed. They would have needed to deploy the gear with the emergency release that removes the residual hydraulic pressure that allows the gear to fall manually. This would have added drag in flight to help them slow the excessive speed and added brakes to help them slow. And there is an alternate flap system that would have further added drag to slow the approach. Without either and the aircraft high and fast, the aircraft touched down almost halfway down the runway at around 180 knots with almost no friction to slow the aircraft.
It will be months before the preliminary accident report is issued, but nothing that has been revealed up until now has changed my opinion that this is anything other than pilot error beyond the initial birdstrike. Nobody can say how they would have reacted in any given situation, but if you do nothing else in an emergency but fly the aircraft, the outcome is more likely to be positive.
Modern crew coordination called Crew Resource Management or CRM teaches that one pilot flies and communicates while the other runs the checklist. This allows the flying pilot to focus on just one thing, getting the aircraft safely on the ground. The captain should have told the first officer, the minute he realized they had to land immediately, to run “Loss of System A and System B” checklist if he had the presence of mind or if not and he just though to get gear and flaps down to manually deploy both once the runway was assured. We cannot know, but either they tried incorrectly or decided on a belly landing. Either way, it was the final tragic mistake.
