An investigative report has revealed that the pilots of the South Korean airliner that crashed and killed 179 people on December 29, 2024, switched off the wrong operational engine.
The South Korean Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board (ARAIB) found that the right engine of the Jeju Air Boeing 737 stopped working after the plane collided with a flock of wild ducks. However, the left engine continued to produce power.
Instead of shutting down the damaged engine, the pilots cut power to the side that was still operational, leaving the aircraft with no working engines.
The investigators said: “A pilot may have mistakenly turned off the engine.”
The cockpit voice recorder captured the pilot saying “shut down engine number two,” but the flight data shows that the pilots instead switched off engine number one, likely due to an error made under the pressure of the situation.
An official told South Korea’s MBN television news: “The pilot should have turned off the right engine, which was severely damaged by the bird strike, but he turned off the left engine, which was spinning, and the black box and power went out.”
The report also stated that the pilots on the Jeju Air flight had activated the left engine’s fire extinguisher, making it impossible to restart the engine while in flight.
The incident began as Flight 2216 was on its approach to Muan International Airport in the southern part of the country. At 8:57 AM, the airport's air traffic control issued a warning about bird activity in the area. Just a minute later, at 8:58 AM, the pilot reported a bird strike and issued a mayday call.
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| Relatives of the crash victims gathered to hear news after the crash on Dec 29 - HAN MYUNG-GU |
The pilots had also ignored the standard procedure for how to land after a bird strike by climbing the aircraft again and then turning to make a rushed landing in the opposite direction on the same runway.
The plane hit the ground at a dangerously high speed without its landing gear lowered and exploded after colliding with an embankment at the end of the runway. All 175 passengers and four of the six crew members were killed in South Korea’s worst aviation disaster in decades.
At a press conference on Saturday, the victims' families accused ARAIB officials of unfairly blaming the pilots. The investigators had to quickly retrieve copies of the report, claiming that it had not yet been formally issued.
Investigators maintain that there were no engine defects or mechanical failures, although power to the aircraft’s flight recorders was shut off for the last four minutes of the flight, so key information may remain unknown.
Kim Yu-jin, the head of the relatives’ group, said: “When investigators take a position, it should be accompanied by documents that support their position and convince the bereaved family that their conclusions are inevitable. We were only given their conclusions."
She added: “We have repeatedly asked them to be careful about these disclosures because the way that the results of the investigation are communicated can have an impact on the compensation that families receive.’’
