Why a wall at the end of runway has sparked questions in South Korea plane crash

‘Mayday, mayday, mayday.’

Before the emergency landing, the pilot repeated the phrase three times and mentioned “bird strike.”

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South Korea is mourning the loss of 179 lives in the country’s worst aviation disaster in decades, which has deeply unsettled a nation already facing political unrest. The political crisis recently resulted in the back-to-back impeachments of President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Han Duk-soo.

In the Jeju plane crash case, attention is now turning to an “unusual” concrete wall near the runway. After landing without its wheels, Jeju Air flight 7C2216 skidded off the runway and collided with the structure.

Why was a wall located so close to the runway? Did its presence lead to the deaths of 179 passengers? Could the tragedy have been averted if the wall had not been there?

We take a look at some of these questions:

Concerns over the ‘unusual’ wall near the runway

Officials said that Sunday’s crash took place after a bird strike, but experts argue that such an incident alone is unlikely to explain the scale of the disaster.

Investigators are now examining the role of the localiser antenna - positioned at the end of the runway to assist landings - in the crash. This includes investigating the concrete embankment on which it was mounted, transport ministry officials said during a media briefing.

Experts told The New York Times that most airports avoid placing such structures close to runways. When they do exist, they are typically constructed from softer materials designed to break apart or absorb impact, minimising damage to planes that overrun runways.

Footage shows the Jeju Air flight veering off the runway before striking the wall and erupting in flames at Muan International Airport.

Notably, while localiser antennas are usually placed at the ends of runways to assist with landings, this particular antenna was installed on top of a concrete-reinforced mound.

Runway safety areas, the zones near runways, are generally designed to provide clear, unobstructed space for aircraft that overrun, undershoot, or veer off course during landing.

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South Korea plane crash cause: What experts said

Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit offering safety guidance to the aviation sector, told The New York Times that barriers near runways “should break easily in the case of a runway overrun so the impact isn’t catastrophic.”

“What we saw here was a head-on collision with a concrete wall that appears very thick,” Shahidi added.

Aviation expert David Learmount told Sky News TV that the failure to deploy landing gear properly was not the cause of the fatalities.

“The passengers were killed by hitting a solid structure just over the end of the runway where a solid structure should not be,” he argued.

Learmount said that if the “obstruction” had not been present, the aircraft “would have come to rest with most - possibly all - those on board still alive.”

Christian Beckert, a flight safety expert and Lufthansa pilot based in Munich, told Reuters, “Normally, on an airport with a runway at the end, you don’t have a wall.”

“You more have maybe an engineered material arresting system, which lets the aeroplane sink into the ground a little bit and brakes (it),” he explained.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) sets global standards requiring runway overruns to be cleared to minimise aircraft damage, but it lacks enforcement power for these guidelines.

“I have never seen anything quite like this before,” Learmount told The Telegraph UK.

“There is no justification for the structure - everybody knows it is meant to be frangible. It is much easier to build something above ground than dig below. That is a possibility.”

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Kim In-gyu, head of the Flight Training Centre at Korea Aerospace University, also questioned the dune-like structure near the runway.

“If there was no dune there, the airliner would have remained more intact,” Kim said on South Korea’s CBS radio news show. “While watching the footage, I was puzzled the most by the existence of this dune. I’ve never seen something like this in any other airports in the world.”

Shawn Pruchnicki, an assistant professor at Ohio State University’s college of engineering, told CNN, “I just cannot think of anything more irresponsible than what (South Korea aviation officials) have done.”

“In my opinion, they are responsible for the amount of people that were killed because of that design,” he said.

“It’s just uncomfortable that you would put a concrete barrier, because what that does is that guarantees destruction and death to the occupants of an airplane that’s going to hit,” Pruchnicki told the media outlet.

Despite these concerns, an official at Muan International Airport told This Week in Asia on Sunday that “there is nothing wrong with this set-up.”

What’s next in the investigation?

On Monday morning, investigators worked to identify some of the more than two dozen victims yet to be named, as grieving families gathered inside the terminal at Muan International Airport. The crash claimed the lives of mainly local residents returning from holidays in Thailand, along with two Thai nationals.

Ministry officials stated that the aircraft’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders had been transported to a research centre at Gimpo International Airport in Seoul for analysis. They earlier said that it could take months to conclude the investigation into the crash.

Muan International Airport will remain closed until Wednesday, while all other international and regional airports in South Korea, including the main hub at Incheon International Airport, are operating as normal.

In line with international aviation regulations, South Korea will oversee the civil investigation into the accident, with mandatory involvement from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), as the aircraft was designed and built in the United States. A large memorial has been set up in a gymnasium about 9 kilometres (5 miles) from the crash site, where mourners, including acting President Choi, have been paying their respects.

Jeju Air flight 7C2216 departed Bangkok and was attempting to land at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea. Following an initial failed landing attempt, the ground control centre issued a bird strike warning. The pilot then sent out a distress signal before the Boeing 737-800 landed with its front landing gear retracted, overshot the runway, collided with a concrete barrier, and erupted into flames.

With inputs from agencies