- A Jeju Air plane crashed in South Korea, killing 179 of 181 on board.
- Investigators are considering the role of a bird strike in the crash.
- Bird strikes have not caused many plane losses, and experts say it may not be the only factor.
Bird strike is being considered as a possible cause of the plane crash in South Korea which killed almost everyone on board.
Although colliding with birds has always been a risk of flying, it has brought down comparatively few modern aircraft.
Some experts said of the Sunday crash that bird strike was unlikely to be the sole cause.
“A bird strike should be a survivable event,” said Sonya Brown, an aerospace-design lecturer at the University of New South Wales, in an interview with The Guardian.
She said that planes are designed to cope with bird strikes. Engine-builders have long tested their designs by launching bird carcasses into running engines to make sure they keep working, as reported by this CNBC article from 2017.
A June report by the US Federal Aviation Administration said wildlife strikes on civilian and military aircraft have killed 491 people and destroyed some 350 aircraft globally between 1988 and 2023.
It said that in the US, 49 civil aircraft were lost because of birds in the period between 1990 and 2023.
While that may sound a lot, it represents a tiny fraction of total losses over that period of more than 30 years.
There were more than 27,000 aircraft fatalities between 1988 and 2021, according to the Aviation Safety Network, putting bird strikes as a factor in fewer than 1.8% of deaths.
Investigators have yet to give a reason for the loss of the Jeju Air flight, a Boeing 737-800.
An official in South Korea’s transport ministry official said the airport’s control tower issued a bird strike warning before the crash, Reuters reported.
The fire chief at Muan International Airport, where the plane crashed, said in a televised briefing that an investigation will consider whether birds stuck the plane.
South Korea’s acting president ordered an emergency inspection of the country’s airline operations. And the government said it will audit all 101 of the country’s 737-800s with US investigators.
But a bird strike is being considered as a cause, or a possible factor.
But other issues have been reported, too.
Video footage showed that the plane landed without its landing gear deployed.
Keith Tonkin, the managing director of Aviation Projects, an aviation consulting company in Australia, previously told BI: “It appears that the aircraft wasn’t configured for a normal landing — the landing gear wasn’t down, and it looks like the wing flaps weren’t extended either.”
Commentators have also pointed to the design of the airport — the plane came to a hard stop when it hit a solid wall near the runway.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator at the US’s Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board, told The New York Times that plane crashes are typically the result of multiple factors at once.
“The aviation industry is built on redundancy and there are very few single-point failures in airplane design or airplane operations,” he said. “Typically, it’s a combination of factors.”
