Aviation experts are raising serious questions about a curious concrete wall near the end of an airport runway in South Korea — after a catastrophic crash killed 179 people on board a Jeju Air flight on Sunday.
The Boeing 737 jet erupted in a fireball — killing all but two people on board Flight 7C2216 — after it skidded off the end of the runway at Muan International Airport and slammed into the structure.
Air safety specialists are now questioning why it was there at all.
David Learmount, a former pilot and flying instructor for the UK’s Royal Air Force, said he had “never seen anything like this.”
“Not only is there no justification [for it to be there], I think it’s verging on criminal to have it there,” Learmount, who is now operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine, told Sky News.
“To have a hard object about 200 meters [about 660ft] or less into the overrun, I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere ever before,” he added. The structure was located about 820ft off the end of the runway.
Christian Beckert, a Lufthansa pilot based in Munich, agreed, calling it “unusual.”
“Normally, on an airport with a runway at the end, you don’t have a wall,” Beckert told Reuters.
Another aviation expert, Chris Kingswood, told the BBC that “obstacles” within a certain distance of the runway are typically required to be “frangible.”
“Aeroplanes are not strong structures — they are, by design, light to make them efficient in flight,” the veteran pilot, who has flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash, explained to the outlet.
“They’re not really designed to go high-speed on its belly so any kind of structure could cause the fuselage to break up and then be catastrophic.”
Ju Jong-wan, director of the Aviation Policy Division at South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, explained to the New York Times that the structure was built to install the so-called localizer antenna, which helps enable the pilot to maintain the correct approach path.
He insisted that it was built according to regulations and that similar walls were found in other airports in South Korea.
However, Hwang Ho-won, chairman of the Korea Association for Aviation Security, told the outlet that if the antenna had been made of a different material, the tragedy might have been avoided.
Ju said the government will consider revising the rules in the wake of the disaster, which became the deadliest air accident ever in South Korea.
The collision with the concrete wall caused the airliner to explode, leaving only the tail section of the Bowing 737 intact.
Just two crew members seated in the rear of the aircraft survived.
Minutes before the crash, the pilot — a veteran with nearly 7,000 hours in the cockpit — reported a bird strike to at least one of the plane’s engines, officials told the New York Times.
The pilot told the air traffic control tower that he would abort the landing attempt and circle back around for another pass, but he apparently didn’t have enough time to complete a full circle and instead came in for an emergency landing from the wrong end of the runway.
Neither the landing gear nor braking systems deployed when the plane hit the ground, turning the aircraft into a giant, metal sled that careened past the end of the runway — and smashed straight into the concrete structure.
Aviation expert and journalist Sally Gethin told Sky News that she agreed the structure was ill-placed, but said the tragedy may have occurred regardless.
“[The plane] seemed to be maintaining speed, so even if there had been more space at the end of the runway it could have possibly ended up being catastrophic,” she said.
Learmount, however, disagreed.
“There was plenty of space for the aircraft to have slowed down, come to a halt,” he told the outlet. “I think everybody would have been alive.”
