A day after the fatal air disaster in South Korea, the answer to what went wrong on Jeju Air flight 2216 remains elusive.
Although experts still do not know what caused the accident that killed 179 people, they say it is unlikely that a bird that struck the engine was the only factor.
The Muan air control tower reportedly issued a bird strike warning shortly before the accident. A South Korean Department of Transportation official told the media that the pilot had told controllers that the plane had suffered a bird strike before declaring mayday.
The first theory was that the impact of the bird caused the engine that powered the landing gear to fail, which in turn caused the fatal accident.
However, Dr Sonya Brown, senior lecturer in aerospace design at the University of New South Wales, is sceptical.
“A bird strike should be a survivable event… It should not lead to what we ultimately saw, especially since in any situation where one of the engines fails (as the images suggest), it still having plenty of power,” he says, adding that bird strikes are so common that they are taken into account in the design of modern airplanes.
On a Boeing 737 and any other commercial aircraft there are several levels of redundancy, especially in the landing gear, which works hydraulically.
“Even if it failed, it has the safety system to open without the hydraulic system, which basically works by gravity, so the landing gear should be able to extend.”
There is also double redundancy in other flight control systems, such as flaps and slats—the latter Brown describes as similar to the aileron on a car—which means that these tools, which are lowered before landing to increase the resistance and slow down the plane, they should be able to activate.
“They operate on two independent hydraulic systems, and it is very unlikely that a bird strike would destroy those two independent hydraulic systems. “It seems there is something more to this incident,” he says.
Professor Doug Drury of Central Queensland University agrees that a bird strike is unlikely to be the only cause.
“A bird strike on an engine would not cause complete failure of all systems; a 737 can fly on one engine,” says Drury, a veteran pilot who has flown commercial, military and private charter flights throughout his career.
As investigators begin to examine black box flight data and cockpit voice recordings, it may be some time before there are definitive answers.
For his part, Drury is baffled by the speed at which the plane approached the runway.
“If you were going to land on your belly, you would do it at stall speed,” he says. “But this plane was sliding down the runway with a lot of energy.”
In addition, the plane landed in the opposite direction to the usual runway direction, meaning it could have landed with a tailwind. Planes usually land against these types of winds to help them slow down.
“Why were they going so fast? ”Right now there are many more questions than answers.”
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