Bird strike warning issued shortly before Jeju Air plane crash in South Korea

By Yoo Jee-ho, SEOUL, Dec. 29 (Yonhap): An airport control tower had warned of a bird strike just six minutes before a Jeju Air passenger jet carrying 181 people crashed in South Korea's southwestern county of Muan, the transport ministry said Sunday.

Officials earlier said the accident happened at around 9:07 a.m. when the Jeju Air flight veered off the runway while landing and collided with a fence wall at Muan International Airport in Muan County, South Jeolla Province, 288 kilometres southwest of Seoul.

According to a press briefing of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, which oversees aviation safety, the control tower issued the warning at 8:57 a.m.

The pilot of the aircraft declared Mayday at 8:59 a.m., not 8:58 a.m. as the ministry had said earlier Sunday. The pilot then attempted to land at 9 a.m. but the plane crashed three minutes later at 9:03 a.m. while landing without its landing gear deployed, it said.

"While attempting to land on runway No. 1, the control tower issued a bird strike warning and the pilot declared mayday shortly after," the ministry said.

Officials said the control tower granted clearance to land in the opposite direction on the runway, after which the pilot attempted a landing until it overshot the runway and hit the wall.

The ministry rejected the notion that the relatively short runway at the Muan airport had contributed to the accident.

The runway there is 2,800 meters long, but with construction work underway, it is currently about 2,500m in actual length.

"The Boeing 737-800 aircraft that crashed today can land on runways that are 1,500m to 1,600m long," a ministry official said. "It's difficult to attribute the accident to the length of the runway because other planes have been landing with no problems."

According to data by the Korea Airports Corp. (KAC), Muan International Airport had reported 10 bird strike incidents from 2019 to August this year.

Per KAC, the 14 international and domestic airports it operates have seen an uptick in bird strikes in recent years, from 76 in 2020 to 109 in 2021, and then to 131 in 2022 and 152 in 2023.

Airports have used acoustic deterrents and other measures to keep birds away, KAC added.

The transport ministry dispatched members of its Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board to the Muan airport on Sunday afternoon. They retrieved the flight data recorder from the plane and were in the process of securing the cockpit voice recorder.

It is expected to take months for the exact cause of the crash to be determined.

Of 181 people aboard -- 175 passengers and six crew members -- 176 were killed with three reported as missing. Two crew members were rescued.

The Muan crash is the third-deadliest aviation accident ever in South Korea. In 1983, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a Korean Air flight that had strayed into Russian airspace, killing all 269 aboard. In 1997, a Korean Air aircraft crashed in Guam and left 225 people dead.