Many questions still remain after the crash in South Korea, one of the biggest being: why weren’t the landing gears deployed?
The crash of a Jeju Air plane while landing in South Korea killed 179 people on Sunday, the worst air disaster in the country’s history.
Among the hypotheses put forward, that of a collision with birds. In the footage of the crash, it is visible that the landing gears were not extended before impact.
To try to better understand what could have happened, we analyzed the images with a pilot. The simulator, in which we sit, allows us to recreate the same conditions as the Jeju Air flight. The same airport, the same weather conditions. “The weather is quite good, we have a crosswind, we have 12 knots of crosswind coming from the left“, shows us Pierre Van Walleghem, manager at “Brussels Flight Simulators”
To lower a landing gear, the pilot lowers a lever. “When the train comes out, there are indicators that show us that it is in transit in red and then when it locks, it will be in green. In theory, this is what we should have“, he explains.
The images of the crash surprise the instructor. “It’s horrible“, he reacts to seeing the video. There is only one certainty, such a landing is the result of a chain of problems. “What pilots are used to doing is what we call go-arounds. These are procedures that are practiced in a simulator, we practice that very often here. In case something is not perfect, or the approach itself is not perfect, we are not perfectly aligned, there is a little doubt, we do not even take no risk, we go around again, we go around again“, said Pierre Van Walleghem.
Someone deliberately left them inside
The plane arrives on the runway at great speed and, above all, the landing gear does not extend. According to the pilots we interviewed, this problem cannot be directly linked to a collision with birds. “There are a lot of planes where you need hydraulics or electricity to get off the wheels. On a 737, no“, indicates pilot Jean-Pierre Ghosez. “So it just means that someone deliberately left them inside. You have to classify this as a failure to lower the landing gear.“.
Was there a general outage? The plane’s signal was lost 150 meters above the ground. The investigation will have to verify these hypotheses.
Crash in South Korea aviation air disaster pilot crash
