Jeju air crash: South Korea reviews ‘special inspection’ plan for Boeing 737-800 fleet

South Korea said Monday it was reviewing plans to conduct a “special inspection” of all Boeing 737-800s in operation in the country, after 179 people were killed in a Jeju Air crash involving the aircraft.

“101 B737-800 series aircraft are currently in operation in South Korea. Consequently, we are reviewing plans to conduct a special inspection on B737-800 aircraft,” said Joo Jong-wan, head of the aviation policy bureau at the South Korean transport ministry.

The Transport Ministry said Monday the government plans to conduct safety inspections on all Boeing 737-800 jetliners operated by the country’s airlines.

On Monday, South Korea’s acting President Choi Sang-mok ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operation system as investigators worked to identify victims and find what caused the country’s deadliest air disaster.

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“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.

The Boeing 737-800 plane operated by South Korea’s budget airline Jeju Air skidded off a runway at Muan International Airport in the country’s south, slammed into a concrete fence and burst into a fireball. The incident killed all but two of the 181 people aboard. The two survivors are both crew members, and they were pulled from the plane’s tail section — the only part that was still recognizable after the crash.

Joo Jong-wan, the Transport Ministry’s director of aviation policy, said authorities have so far identified 141 of the bodies, and are conducting DNA tests on the other 38.

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Alan Price, a former chief pilot at Delta Air Lines and now a consultant, said the Boeing 737-800 is a “proven airplane” that belongs to a different class of aircraft than the Boeing 737 Max jetliner that was linked to fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019.

With inputs from agencies