- A plane crashed at an airport in South Korea on Sunday, killing nearly all of its passengers.
- An aviation expert told BI that the pilots were possibly overwhelmed after a bird strike.
- South Korea has transformed its air travel industry from a ‘pariah’ to one of the world’s safest.
A plane crashed in South Korea, killing nearly all on board and surprising an industry that has come to view the nation as one of the world’s safest for air travel.
Flight 7C2216, a 15-year-old Boeing 737-800 operated by the Korean budget airline Jeju Air, crashed while landing at Muan International Airport just after 9 a.m. local time on Sunday. Of the 181 people on board, there were just two survivors, both crew members.
Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In recent years, South Korea has been considered among the safest for air travel, but it wasn’t always that way.
“25 years ago, South Korea was a pariah in the aviation industry,” Airline News editor and aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas told Business Insider. He said the nation’s safety standards have since improved “dramatically.”
Sunday’s crash marks the first fatal accident for Jeju Air, founded in 2005 and named one of the best low-cost airlines in the world in 2024 by aviation ranking website AirlineRatings.com.
The airline was founded after decades of fatal crashes prompted the nation to rehabilitate its aviation safety culture.
Years of deadly crashes
South Korea had a decadeslong history of crashes due to pilot errors.
Before 2000, Korean Air and Asiana Airlines were the two main airlines operating in South Korea. In mid-December, Korean Air completed a $1.3 billion acquisition of Asiana Airlines, marking a new era in the country’s aviation industry.
Korean Air — the country’s flag carrier and its biggest — struggled with safety during the latter part of the 20th century. The airline had seven fatal passenger and cargo crashes between 1978 and 1999, according to data from the Aviation Safety Network.
Pilot error was cited as a contributing factor in each.
credit should read KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images
Some 75 passengers and crew, plus four people on the ground, died in 1989 when Korean Air Flight 803 crashed while attempting to land at Tripoli International Airport in Libya.
An Associated Press report published in 1990 said the Seoul Criminal Court sentenced the pilot, who cited poor visibility, to two years in prison for causing the crash.
One of the worst incidents happened in 1997 when Korean Air Flight 801 flew from Seoul to Guam. The Boeing 747 plane attempted to land at the A.B. Won Guam International Airport when it crashed, resulting in the deaths of over 200 passengers.
The National Transportation Safety Board published a report on Flight 801, which said the probable cause for the crash was the “captain’s failure to adequately brief and execute” the approach, combined with the first officer and flight engineer’s failure to monitor or challenge the captain.
Two fatal Korean cargo flights in 1999 also pointed to serious safety problems, including failed crew communication and cooperation.
In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images
Founded nearly 20 years after Korean Air, Asiana only had one fatal crash before 2000, when a Boeing 737 landed short of Mokpo’s airport in South Korea in 1993. Reuters reported that an inquiry found that pilot error was the cause of the crash, which killed over 60 people.
The series of crashes made Korean Air a pariah in the aviation industry.
In 1999, Delta and Air France suspended their code-share partnerships with Korean Air, temporarily severing their airline alliances.
Around the same time, the US Department of Defense banned its employees from flying on Korean Air planes.
In 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration downgraded South Korea’s safety rating, citing its failure to meet international standards — representing a particularly low point for the nation.
From unreliable to the gold standard
In the late 1990s, South Korea embarked on an effort to rehabilitate its air safety reputation. It hired a retired Delta executive to help overhaul training and hiring practices.
Investigations of several Korean Air crashes found that cultural issues in the cockpit — wherein first officers and flight engineers didn’t communicate effectively with the captains or hesitated to challenge them — were partly to blame for the deadly accidents.
According to a 2006 report from The Wall Street Journal, the airline shored up its training by increasing shared responsibilities among pilots and reducing its hiring of Korean Air Force veterans who struggled to collaborate with others who they considered inferior in rank.
The cultural changes paid off in the years to come.
By 2002, Delta and Air France resumed their partnerships with Korean Air, and the FAA upgraded the airline’s safety rating. Likewise, the US Department of Defense lifted the ban on employees flying on the airline.
AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
By 2008, South Korea performed better than US airlines in the International Civil Aviation Organization’s safety audit.
Korean Air is today considered among the world’s safest airlines, and is part of the international SkyTeam Alliance — which requires strict high levels of safety to join.
“They certainly have cleaned up,” Thomas, the editor from Airline News, told BI.
He added that Jeju Air had an “excellent” record since its founding and that the 737-800 is “the workhorse of the world.”
“It is the most reliable aircraft out there, so everybody knows how it works,” Thomas said.
In the case of Sunday’s crash, Thomas said the pilots were likely overwhelmed as they were dealing with “a disaster.”
“I think the issue is multiple bird strikes and then multiple failures resulting from that,” Thomas said. “I would expect by the end of the week we will have critical information about exactly what went on, the multiple failures, and the cockpit discussion about what was going on.”
But some information may not be immediately available to the public, he said.
“As a responsible country, any safety learnings from this would come out immediately so this information could be passed on to other operators of the 737 model of aircraft,” Thomas said. “It may not necessarily be transmitted to the general public, but it would be transmitted to airline operators to alert them to a particular failure to check their own aircraft.”
