Bird strike unlikely sole cause of fatal South Korean plane crash, experts say
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Even as experts remain puzzled by Jeju Air crash, they are sceptical a bird strike was sole cause of fatal disaster. One day after the fatal airline disaster in South Korea, the answer as to what went wrong with Jeju Air 2216 remains elusive. Even as experts remain puzzled by what caused the crash that killed 179 people, experts say that a bird striking the engine is unlikely to be the sole factor.
The air traffic control tower at Muan reportedly issued a bird strike warning shortly before the incident, with a South Korean transport department official telling media the pilot had told controllers the plane had suffered a bird strike before declaring mayday.
The early theory was that the bird strike led to the failure of the engine that powered the landing gear, which in turn caused the fatal belly landing. However, Dr Sonya Brown, a 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 eventually saw, particularly because in any situation where one engine is non-functioning (as the footage suggests), there’s still plenty of power,” she says, adding that bird strikes are so common that they are factored into the design of modern planes.
On a Boeing 737 and any commercial airliner there are layers of redundancy, especially for the landing gear, which is hydraulically operated, she says. “Even if that were to fail, it has redundancy in that it can still extend without the hydraulics system [which is] basically gravity operated, so the landing gear should still be able to extend.”.
