Summary
A Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 crashed at Muan International Airport, South Korea, killing 179 people, with only two crew members surviving. The black boxes stopped recording four minutes before the crash.
Authorities are investigating the cause of the malfunctioning black box. They suspect a bird strike, as feathers were found in one engine, and video footage confirmed a bird impact. However, the exact cause of the crash remains elusive.
Investigators are probing why the landing gear wasn’t deployed, the role of power failure in missing black box data, and the construction of the airfield wall the plane hit.
Everything about this incident is just so fucking odd. That a bird strike could take out both engines isn’t unheard of (see US Airways Flight 1549) but I’ve heard reports that there was a failed emergency landing attempt before the one that we saw video of, so they clearly had thrust enough to stay in the air for a go-around, and from the video we saw they carried in a ton more speed than I would expect if there had been catastrophic damage to both engines.
Except that the lack of landing gear suggests loss of hydraulic power from both engines… Except there is an emergency release that drops the gear on a 737 with just gravity, and there’s no evidence this was even attempted.
Now it looks like some electrical systems, including power to the data recorders, died right at the start of the incident, which would require not just double engine failure but failure of the APU and backup battery systems. That just seems incredibly unlikely.
Catastrophic electrical failure several minutes before the crash, though, would suggest that it wasn’t just a case of a panicked aircrew making a chain of bad decisions, which was my initial read of the situation and maybe the best fit for the rest of the circumstances.
I just can’t think of a chain of events that could reasonably lead to all the failures in evidence while still allowing the aircraft to remain airworthy for two landing attempts.
And then you get to the horrifying fact that a relatively new and modern airport had a giant concrete obstacle in what would be considered the Runway Safety Area at a US facility… Like, what the fuck? That seems like it’s designed to create this sort of a disaster.
The swiss cheese model says that a bunch of failures have to line up just to make one bad thing happen, but in this case it seems like only a few failures lined up and a bunch of bad things happened. This is highly unusual.
Depends on the field you’re in. In IT cascading failures are common.
My gut tells me that there was also a sensor failure and that the pilots were operating on erroneous information, which caused them to take actions that ended up compounding the problem.
Only a few that we know of so far.
But here’s the list I’m tracking -
Video footage and teardrop go around suggests neither engine was producing thrust.
Possible smoke in cabin making an already hard go around harder
Runway on wrong side of go around for primary pilot to have good visibility
Airport did not staff anti bird crew correctly
Airport does not have state of the art anti bird systems
Pilots decided on a go around instead of putting the bird struck plane on the ground for unknown reason. (Generally you continue your approach if you can) The unknown reason could be pilot error or a mechanical failure.
That’s quite a lot to go wrong already.
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Your comment posted multiple times. Lol
Must be one of those cascading failures I’ve heard about.
I know you joke, but likely not far from the truth. I was talking about misleading sensors, and this is an example of that - either my client didn’t get a response from the server indicating that the comment was received and retried, or my server didn’t get a response on OP’s server. Either way miscommunication happened, and the result (repeated comments, and from what I can see received at different times too) is much worse than the desired result (one comment entry only).
It seems like everyone is talking about these cascading failures.
I didn’t, but now I’m paranoid that whatever caused the comment to be sent multiple times is still going on 😅
Uh, you ok bud?
Very odd, I swear I wrote the post only once. I was having slowness loading the page - maybe there was a problem with my client not being able to get a response from the server and retrying, or the server processing the post multiple times (timestsamps are odd too)? Kind of serendipitous though - one system not getting the data it expects, and defaulting to a behaviour that is unintended.
Must be one of those cascading failures we’ve been told about
Not sure what’s going on but this comment has been posted like 10 times from your account on this thread
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Why did you post this same comment nine times?
See the other threads. I Posted the comment once, but something (either client or server) kept posting it. It could have been a temporary misconfiguration (happened at least once before), a bug in the server code, or a combination of unreliable network and my client retrying.
I don’t believe the APU would be usable in flight, but they should have a RAT. Also don’t black boxes have their own batteries?
737s don’t have RATs. According to some 737 pilots I’ve seen commenting, the APU is operable in flight, but doesn’t kick in automatically and would have required ~60 seconds to start. The main electrical generators don’t automatically restart after tripping, either, so a scenario where electric power is hypothetically available, but a panicked or overloaded flight crew don’t take the steps to bring it online, is plausible.
You have normally 2 segregated electrical system (1 & 2) with, for each system, several sub-segregation (like primary, secondary, essential, secours with bus bars, contactors that can cut some non-essential systems depending on rules or switch in the overhead panel) and several sources of power (engines, apu, batteries, sometime rat).
Black boxes don’t have battery (to dangerous, the battery could destroy the recordings when damaged and that would also require specific maintenance) but normally they have several power source. Loosing power like that is strange and could indicate a fire or a maintenance problem (on board batteries should be able to work for at least 40min without engine… but they had a running engine as far as i know… that doesn’t make any sense).
APU can be run while flying, you must be below a certain flight level to use it (<FL100?).
APU’s absolutely are usable in flight, and if the plane is ETOPS certified (I don’t know if Jeju is) then they even have to be able to start the APU at cruise altitude after cold soaking for 2+ hours
Good to know