Officials have revealed that the flight that crashed in South Korea and killed 179 people was warned about a bird strike minutes before the incident, The Guardian reported.
While the accident remains under investigation, and there are reports that detail other possible explanations identified by aviation experts, bird strikes can cause in-air catastrophes.
The airport at which Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 crash-landed on Sunday, Muan International Airport, has the highest rate of bird strikes out of any of South Korea’s airports, according to The Guardian. It has recorded 10 such incidents between 2019 and August of this year.
Nevertheless, aviation experts have questioned whether a bird strike alone could have caused the plane to skid off the runway, with no landing gear deployed, before colliding with a wall and exploding. Just two people survived.
Experts questioned whether a bird strike alone could have caused the crash. / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Flight safety expert Christian Beckert told Reuters, based on video footage of the crash, that the “big problem” was that the plane’s braking systems did not activate.
He said that it was not likely that a bird strike could have damaged the landing gear while it was still—and even if it did, then it would have been hard for the landing gear to have been raised again afterward.
“It’s really, really very rare and very unusual not to lower the gear, because there are independent systems where we can lower the gear with an alternate system,” he told Reuters.
Geoffrey Thomas, an aviation editor and writer, agreed that it would be surprising if a bird strike alone had caused the crash.
“A bird strike is not unusual, problems with an undercarriage are not unusual,” added Geoffrey Thomas, an aviation editor and writer. “Bird strikes happen far more often, but typically they don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves.”
Gregory Alegi, a former teacher at Italy’s air force academy, was even more emphatic on that point.
“Of course there might have been a bird strike,” he told Reuters. “But the consequences are much too big for that to be the direct cause of the accident.”
The experts suggested that South Korea’s investigation should shed more light on what exactly went wrong.
As Alegi summed it up, “At this point there are a lot more questions than we have answers.”
