South Korea To Inspect Boeing Aircraft as It Struggles To Find Cause of Plane Crash (apnews.com) 43
South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircraft operated by the country's airlines, as they struggle to determine what caused a plane crash that killed 179 people a day earlier. From a report: Sunday's crash, the country's worst aviation disaster in decades, triggered an outpouring of national sympathy. Many people worry how effectively the South Korean government will handle the disaster as it grapples with a leadership vacuum following the recent successive impeachments of President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the country's top two officials, amid political tumult caused by Yoon's brief imposition of martial law earlier this month.
New acting President Choi Sang-mok on Monday presided over a task force meeting on the crash and instructed authorities to conduct an emergency review of the country's aircraft operation systems. "The essence of a responsible response would be renovating the aviation safety systems on the whole to prevent recurrences of similar incidents and building a safer Republic of South Korea," said Choi, who is also deputy prime minister and finance minister.
New acting President Choi Sang-mok on Monday presided over a task force meeting on the crash and instructed authorities to conduct an emergency review of the country's aircraft operation systems. "The essence of a responsible response would be renovating the aviation safety systems on the whole to prevent recurrences of similar incidents and building a safer Republic of South Korea," said Choi, who is also deputy prime minister and finance minister.
No reverse thrust (Score:2, Informative)
Re: No reverse thrust (Score:4, Informative)
The landing gear on a 737 can lower via gravity. If theres enough time of course.
Re: No reverse thrust (Score:5, Informative)
Re: No reverse thrust (Score:4, Insightful)
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This.
If it was a total hydraulics failure, at least we'd have seen partially deployed gear. I'm puzzling over what sort of single engine failure plus inadvertent wrong engine shutdown would have depleted the hydraulics accumulators so rapidly. My money is on an accidental wheels up landing due to cockpit workload.
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I had heard that they may have had partial gear available but decided no gear (but balanced) was better than partial and unbalanced.
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CNN reported that gravity might have failed which kept the landing gear from dropping.
Re:No reverse thrust (Score:4, Insightful)
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I kinda presume the wall is a last resort and might be the only thing here that actually functioned properly.
Better that a plane-full of people die, than a plane-full and a building-full and a road-full or whatever else is on the other side of the wall, you know? What an awful situation.
Re:No reverse thrust (Score:5, Informative)
From what I've been reading, the current theory seems to be that one engine failed, the pilots made a mistake diagnosing it and shut down the wrong one (this happens distressingly often), then panicked and did a no-flaps, no-gear landing despite the backup options that existed to deploy either one. That meant a high landing speed, no brakes, and a plane that "floated" in ground effect longer than normal so it touched down halfway down the runway. Then it hit the antenna berm/wall. Note that some distance beyond the wall are things like trees and houses, so letting the plane slide further into those would not necessarily have produced a better outcome.
The investigation will answer these questions. If the above is true then while the wall would be a contributing factor, it would not be primary cause.
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There should have been some engineered materials arresting system after the end of the runway.
It wouldn't have made a difference. EMAS relies on the landing gear digging in to bring the plane to a halt. It doesn't collapse under the weight of an aircraft if that weight is distributed for the underbelly. Most airports around the world don't have an EMAS. The stopway is already a generous 125m long.
There is an additional 200m of space between the end of the stopway and the wall. In many airports around the world (including large international ones like Charles De Gaulle) that kind of distance would ha
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Its not a wall, its an earthwork for the localiser antenna, and that end of the runway is several metres below the altitude of the runways threshold, so the localiser antenna needs to be elevated. Hence why its on an earthwork.
Whether its a earthwork or a metal structure, that aircraft would have been going through a significant structure at that point and the end result would likely have been the same.
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How many airports (relatively / percentage) are in the same situation: that localisers need to be elevated?
All of them. The localizer antennas broadcast two overlapping signals aligned down the center line of the runway. The plane maneuvers left and right to balance the signals so they are on the runway center line even if they can't see it. The localizer antennas are at the far end of the runway so they transmit down the length of the runway and miles into the approach path. There is a second set of antennas at the other end for approaches from the opposite direction.
If the ground at the end of the runway i
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I agree. The core problem that changed this from almost nobody dead to almost everybody dead was that wall that has no business being there.
Well, this is probably one of these things where, in this case, airport designers realize some of them have screwed up really badly and this goes on the list of engineering things to decidedly _not_ do ever again.
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but the runway ended in a crazy concrete wall
It did not. The pictures shown in the news are taking with an insanely long lens and do not even remotely reflect the scale and position of the wall. The actual runway ends with a 125m of stop way designed to crumple and bring aircraft to an instant halt if they overshoot the runway (but it relies on the landing gear digging in). After that there's an 200m of nothing before the relatively low concrete wall that separates the airport from the southern access road to the airport.
This is actually perfectly nor
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Correction: not all stopways are designed to crumple. That would be EMAS and this airport didn't have that. But it still wouldn't have helped since it relies on the landing gear being deployed.
It wouldn't have been a crash (Score:1)
If some idiots hadnt green lit the building of a concrete wall just off the end of the runway.
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And years after what happened at midway airport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It appears they wanted to be absolutely certain a jet couldn't run off the runway based on its proximity to people.
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It appears they wanted to be absolutely certain a jet couldn't run off the runway based on its proximity to people.
Well, do be fair, they achieved that. Apparently nobody considered what that actually means though. I predict we will find abject incompetence and deep corruption here.
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EMAS exists but likely wouldnt have had much of an effect in this case, because the aircraft would probably have skipped over it due to no landing gear deployed.
Make no mistake, that aircraft was going like a bat out of hell at a point where it shouldnt have had any energy at all - it had a huge amount of kinetic energy, and the fact that it went through the localiser antenna earthwork shows that. Theres very little currently in existence which would have stopped that aircraft safely.
Re: It wouldn't have been a crash (Score:4, Informative)
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The wall was there to keep the landing system antenna stuff from getting flopped over in a typhoon, which had happened more than a few times already. So they build a fucking block of reinforced concrete under it as an anchor. Except that they built it above the ground, right at the end of a runway, rather than taking the time to dig a hole so that it would be level with the ground. And then they put a little dirt and grass on top to make it look like a friendly little hill.
And yeah, they didn't put any fra
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Muan International Airport's Airport Operations Manual said the navigation equipment, called localizers, was installed too near the end of the runway, or just 199 m (218 yards) from the crash site. The document, prepared by Korea Airports Corp and uploaded on its website, said the airport authority should "review securing additional distance during phase two of Muan International Airport's expansion".
The runway design did not meet industry best practices, however, said John Cox, chief executive of Safety Operating Systems and a former 737 pilot, adding that they preclude any hard structure like a berm within at least 300 m (330 yards) of the end of the runway. https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]
A shot of the concrete/mound for the localizer https://i.postimg.cc/RFgWnFym/... [postimg.cc]
and from behind https://i.postimg.cc/GmQ28tZp/... [postimg.cc]
Boeing? (Score:1)
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Two incidents same day (Score:5, Informative)
Same airline had a second Boeing 737-800 report a hydraulic failure the same day, which is why they're inspecting all planes of this type in South Korea. But it surprises me that no other country or airline is conducting any kind of safety check, even on a small sample of aircraft.
The sequence of events seems to be roughly this:
1. Hydraulic power was lost.
2. One aircraft made a successful emergency landing. The jet that crashed failed on first attempt.
3. On second attempt, all power was lost, resulting in no capacity to deploy flaps. Thus suggests the power loss is a result of slow damage caused by hydraulic loss, but we won't be sure until investigation is done.
4. Plane landed third of the way down runway and skidded into concrete radio beacon and mound.
5. Black boxes severely damaged by crash and explosion.
The black boxes are in an unknown state, as they're going to be electronic and there was no power. We have no guarantee that they will reveal anything after that power loss, even if the data survived.
My guess is that the investigators will find more on the plane that survived. There's not much info on it, but if the power lines were damaged when the hydraulic system failed, that might tell us a lot more than the exploded plane can.
But because it didn't explode or crash, I'm not sure if it'll be part of the investigation or merely repaired. I'm firmly convinced that the decision on this aircraft will prove critical.
The concreted radio beacon is considered safe, as that's the wrong way to land on that runway, but I'm unclear from the reports what, precisely, it is an aid for. If you just want a radio beacon, place the circuit below ground in a concrete box and have just the aerial on the surface. Colliding with an aerial is less likely to be dangerous and underground circuits will be easier to reach and subjected to fewer climate stresses.
I don't think they could have easily stopped the plane, but I'm unaware of any effort to dump fuel or otherwise lessen the risk of fire. If such measures were taken, they're not being reported.
The failure of two different systems also tells me that there's no redundancy and that both systems occupy the same space in at least one point, possibly along the same ducts. There's just about no other way the failure of one could cause the failure of the other.
The pilots did not follow the recommended remedial procedures for electrical failure, according to aviation reports, which might suggest they knew the system was fubar, but they might also have been too busy.
We will know more later, obviously, but I would be very cautious of Boeing 737-800s if they're not being inspected anywhere else. Until we know what the fault actually is, assuming it is local to one carrier in one country, where said country is good on aircraft safety checks, is probably risky.
Re: Two incidents same day (Score:5, Interesting)
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Possble, certainly. A few reports are saying the reversers were deployed, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were functional. That bit isn't mentioned at all, and as only some reports mention the reversers, it's not certain that those reports are accurate.
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There are actually different procedures for different types of missed approaches. For example, a go-around due to wind shear is executed with the gear down, while a normal go-around calls for raising the gear. This difference has led to tragedy before, as the captain (pilot flying) said "going around" and the first officer then raised the gear because that's what they do, but it was a wind shear go-around, so when they got slammed into the ground by the next microburst, the gear was already up.
Note to Slashdot admins (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd posted a related story describing a second jet from the same airline that failed in the same way on the same day. Please could you add the link to that as an addendum to this, as it seems a very important part of events. You can then junk my submission as we don't really need two discussions about this.
Struggles to find cause of plane crash :o (Score:2)
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The wall is the cause of the scale of death.
The cause of crash is long before the plane contacted the runway.
Cause of crash or cause of emergency landing? (Score:4, Interesting)
The cause of the emergency landing seems to be a bird strike crippling an engine. That normally shouldn't happen, but it's also not unknown and the 737 isn't any more vulnerable to that than any other jet aircraft. That shouldn't have prompted a gear-up landing, though, so I think the first thing South Korea should be looking at is the black boxes for information on what damage occurred after takeoff and what the flight crew were saying as they decided on how to land the plane.
The fatal part, the cause of that's fairly obvious: the bloody concrete bunker directly off the end of the runway. It shouldn't be there. Localizer equipment, yes that's there, but in every airport I've seen the antenna are on wooden or lightweight metal frames that'll disintegrate on impact and the electronics is in wood or tin huts no stronger than's needed to protect against wind/rain.
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The fatal part, the cause of that's fairly obvious: the bloody concrete bunker directly off the end of the runway.
There is no concrete barrier at the end of the runway. The end of the runway has a 125m long stopway and then 200m grass section before the concrete fence separates the airport from the road. This is already generous. Many runways around the world would have after 325m of the end of the runway buildings, highways, drops, oceans, etc. Airports do not assume any safety factor beyond the stopway.
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I believe that is incorrect. Past the end of the runway were the localizer antennas, which were build on a sturdy berm and concrete wall. Colliding with that is what trashed the plane.
most likely simple (Score:2)
The current most likely explanation is that the pilots shut down the wrong engine, as the engine that had the bird strike appears to be running at touchdown, while the other one is not. Lack of thrust prevented them from using hydraulics to lower the landing gear, and they did not have enough time to do so manually.
If that wall weren't there, the belly landing would be highly survivable, as they stayed on the runway til the end.