Rescuers work near the wreckage of the Jeju Air aircraft. - kim hong-ji/Reuters
The Jeju Air crash has raised concerns about the design of a South Korean airport and whether a concrete-reinforced mound beyond the runway played a significant role in one of the deadliest plane accidents in recent years.
On Sunday morning local time, a Jeju Air flight suffered an apparent bird strike as it approached Muan International Airport. The Boeing 737-800 jet attempted to land at a high rate of speed without its landing gear down, slid off the runway and slammed into a roughly 7-foot-high barrier, where navigation antennas held in place with concrete sat atop a mound of dirt. The crash killed 179 people and left two survivors.
Structures like the one in the Jeju Air crash aren’t unusual at airports worldwide, but a patchwork of international standards has influenced where they are placed and how they are constructed. U.S. regulators moved decades ago to standardize buffer zones near runways and introduce other safeguards to minimize casualties and damage should planes slide off.
Investigators are probing the circumstances around the crash and why the plane didn’t have its landing gear down as it approached the runway. The probe will likely assess whether the structure at the Muan airport met international standards for runway buffer zones.
Aviation-safety experts and industry officials said the barrier at Muan likely made the crash far deadlier than had the plane been able to slide to a stop.
“That airplane was doing absolutely fine till it hit that,” said John Cox, a former Boeing 737 airline pilot who is now an aviation-safety consultant. The structure, he said, “contributed certainly to the severity of the accident.”
Safety areas at most large commercial U.S. airports extend 1,000 feet from the end of runways, and are about 500 feet wide, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. That is larger than the international standard of those zones being at least 787 feet long and 295 feet wide.
South Korean officials on Tuesday said the airport’s design didn’t violate national safety protocols and cautioned that more reviews were needed before reaching conclusions. The structure at Muan is more than 800 feet from the end of the airport’s lone runway, officials said.
South Korea requires that airports establish a safety zone that extends at least 295 feet, or 90 meters, past the end of the runway. Muan’s own zone stretched to roughly 650 feet—with the set of antennas, known as a localizer, placed about 170 feet farther out.
Structures erected in the safety zone have certain requirements for their composition.
“The reason for installing the support is to not have it be affected by wind or shaking,” the transport ministry official said Tuesday. “Since it was outside the safety zone, we made the judgment that there was no restriction on the material.”
A 10-member team of investigators from the U.S. government and Boeing have traveled to the crash site, where they are assisting a 12-member South Korean team leading the crash probe.
On Wednesday, South Korea’s Transport Ministry said it had extracted data from the cockpit voice recorder and would need about two days to convert it into an audio file. The other black box, a flight-data recorder, is damaged and will need to be sent to the U.S. for recovery. South Korean officials plan to travel to the U.S. to participate in the analysis process.
In the U.S., the FAA has imposed rules to create safety areas to reduce the chances that planes overrunning or undershooting a runway collide with ground equipment, strike nearby buildings or damage the aircraft. A spokesman for the International Civil Aviation Organization said it is up to individual countries to implement recommended standards.
The FAA said it has spent over $3 billion since fiscal 2000 to improve more than 1,000 runway safety areas in the U.S. The agency created its standard for runway buffers in 1988.
Air-safety officials have also pushed for airport structures like lighting systems and navigation equipment to be frangible, or easily able to break away upon impact with an aircraft.
A plane sliding across grass may not pose a serious hazard, said Bruce Landry, a former senior FAA airport safety inspector. However, he said structures along the way could puncture fuel tanks or tear apart the structure of an airplane.
Efforts to make U.S. runways safer accelerated after the crash of an American Airlines flight at Little Rock, Ark., in 1999. After the accident, which took 11 lives, the National Transportation Safety Board attributed some of the fatal injuries to a lighting system that wasn’t designed to break away.
In cases where it isn’t feasible to make runway safety areas larger, aviation-safety officials have installed a so-called engineered materials arresting system to quickly and safely slow fast-moving aircraft. Airplane tires are supposed to sink in the crushable material.
A satellite image of Muan International Airport before the crash. - 2024 planet labs inc./Reuters
In October 2016, a chartered jet carrying future Vice President Mike Pence was slowed using a similar system when it went off a runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
“It didn’t do substantial damage to the aircraft, so it was really a success story,” said Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation-safety consultant who was the FAA’s accident investigation chief at the time.
Despite the push in the U.S., airports around the world often don’t have runway buffer zones that are up to international standards.
“You can’t have fixed, rigid obstacles off the end of the runway,” said Capt. Steve Jangelis, aviation-safety chair for the Air Line Pilots Association, which has advocated for buffer zones at airports globally.
Jangelis, who was speaking generally, said where airports have established runway buffers, “there have been lives saved.”
