Summary
South Korea will remove a concrete barrier at Muan International Airport following the December 29 Jeju Air crash, which killed 179 people.
The plane overshot the runway and collided with the barrier, causing an explosion.
Authorities will replace the structure with breakable materials and expand safety zones at seven airports.
A bird strike is also being investigated as a potential cause, with feathers found in the plane’s engines.
You must log in or register to comment.
I had to look this up. The plane crashed into a concrete barrier that was installed to lift the “localizers,” lightweight radio beacons on sticks that help pilots navigate the airport. Normally they have to be completely “frangible,” meaning that a plane would barrel right through them with no problem.
The issue here was that the ground was a bit low so they had to be raised up high enough to get a proper signal, and these were 10 meters outside the 240 meter safety zone where everything had to be frangible. I assume 240 was chosen for some reason, and I hope to hell it wasn’t just to save money by avoiding a retrofit somewhere, but either way this looks like a classic case of “regulations are written in blood.”
Yeah. The crash should’ve been survivable. If, as many have theorized, the pilots lost both engines (or believed they had), gliding to the runway with no gear or flaps makes sense. Both would introduce drag and could prevent reaching the runway. Unfortunately, they landed long and fast, preventing them from slowing sufficiently. Even so, at most airports this shouldn’t have been nearly so bad. It would’ve been bad, but not “explosion and loss of nearly everyone on board” bad.
The direct cause of the fatalities in this incident is that damn berm, something that would never be allowed at a modern airfield in the United States and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere. If you need additional height on the localizer, you use a tear-away structure that will not cause an aircraft to explode when struck.
Frangible sounds like a word I’d make up when I can’t remember a word
You see, jimmy, sometimes the words ‘tangible,’ ‘fragile,’ and ‘fungible’ love each other very much…
