A team of US investigators, including representatives from Boeing, on Tuesday examined the site of a plane crash that killed 179 people in South Korea, while authorities were conducting safety inspections on all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines.
All but two of the 181 people aboard the Boeing 737-800 operated by South Korean budget airline Jeju Air died in Sunday’s crash. Video showed the aircraft, without its landing gear deployed, crash-landed on its belly and overshoot a runaway at Muan International Airport before it slammed into a barrier and burst into flames.
The plane was seen having engine trouble. Preliminary examinations also say that the pilots received a bird strike warning from the ground control center and issued a distress signal as well.
Photo: AP
However, experts say the landing gear issue was likely the main cause of the crash.
The South Korean government has launched safety inspections on all the 101 Boeing 737-800s in the country.
The South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that authorities were looking at maintenance and operation records during five days of safety checks that are to run until tomorrow.
The ministry said that a delegation of eight US investigators — one from the US Federal Aviation Administration, three from the US National Transportation Safety Board and four from Boeing — made an on-site visit to the crash site on Tuesday.
The results of their examination were not immediately available.
Jeju Air president Kim E-bae on Tuesday told reporters that his company would add more maintenance workers and reduce flight operations by 10 to 15 percent until March as part of efforts to enhance the safety of aircraft operations.
John Hansman, an aviation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the crash was most likely the result of a problem with the plane’s hydraulic control systems.
That would be consistent with the landing gear and wing flaps not being deployed, “and might indicate a control issue which would explain the rush to get on the ground,” Hansman said.
The Boeing 737-800 — an earlier version of 737 than the MAX — is a widely used plane with a good safety record, said Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California who has studied aviation safety.
The failure of the plane’s system for broadcasting location, operating its landing gear and extending the wing flaps to slow down indicate a widespread problem that affected electrical and hydraulic systems, Meshkati said.
Investigators would learn what went wrong by analyzing information from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, he said.
“These are really the two pillars for accident analysis and accident reconstruction,” Meshkati said.
Like other aviation experts, Meshkati also questioned the location of a solid wall just a few hundred meters past the end of the runway, given that planes occasionally do overshoot runways.
“Having such a big concrete barrier over there was really very bad luck for this particular airplane,” he said.
South Korean officials have said they will look into whether the Muan airport’s localizer — a concrete fence housing a set of antennas designed to guide aircraft safely during landings — should have been made with lighter materials that would break more easily upon impact.
WAKE-UP CALL: Firms in the private sector were not taking basic precautions, despite the cyberthreats from China and Russia, a US cybersecurity official said A ninth US telecom firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and telephone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said on Friday. Officials from the administration of US President Joe Biden this month said that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon. US Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger on Friday told reporters that a ninth victim
A shark attack off Egypt’s Red Sea coast killed a tourist and injured another, authorities said on Sunday, with an Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs source identifying both as Italian nationals. “Two foreigners were attacked by a shark in the northern Marsa Alam area, which led to the injury of one and the death of the other,” the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said in a statement. A source at the Italian foreign ministry said that the man killed was a 48-year-old resident of Rome. The injured man was 69 years old. They were both taken to hospital in Port Ghalib, about 50km north
‘DECREE 147’: Tech giants operating in Vietnam must verify accounts via phone numbers or IDs, and must provide users’ personal data to authorities on request New Vietnamese Internet rules requiring Facebook and TikTok to verify user identities and hand over data to authorities came into force yesterday, in what critics say is the latest attack on freedom of expression. Under “Decree 147,” all tech giants operating in Vietnam must verify users’ accounts via their phone numbers or Vietnamese identification numbers and store that information alongside their full name and date of birth. They must provide that data to authorities on request and remove any content that the government regards as “illegal” within 24 hours. All social media sites had been given 90 days to provide data on “the
POWER PLAY: The dam is planned to more than triple the 88.2 billion kilowatt-hours designed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, which is currently the world’s largest China has approved the construction of what would be the world’s largest hydropower dam, launching an ambitious project on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau that could affect millions downstream in India and Bangladesh. The dam, which would be in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River, could produce 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, according to an estimate provided by Power Construction Corp of China in 2020. That would more than triple the 88.2 billion kilowatt-hours designed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, in central China. The project would play a major role in meeting China’s
RSS