Each engines of the Jeju Air aircraft that crashed final month contained duck stays, in line with a preliminary report, with authorities nonetheless making an attempt to find out what precipitated the deadliest air catastrophe on South Korean soil.
The six-page report, launched by South Korean authorities on Monday, a month after the crash, mentioned each engines of the Boeing BA.N 737-800 jet contained DNA from Baikal Teals, a kind of migratory duck that flies to South Korea for winter in big flocks.
However the report supplied no preliminary conclusions about what might have precipitated the aircraft to land with out its touchdown gear deployed, and why flight knowledge recorders stopped recording within the closing 4 minutes of the flight.
The Jeju Air flight from Bangkok on 29 December overshot Muan Airport’s runway because it made an emergency stomach touchdown and crashed into an embankment containing navigation tools, referred to as localisers, killing all however two of the 181 passengers and crew members on board.
“After the crash into the embankment, hearth and a partial explosion occurred. Each engines have been buried within the embankment’s soil mound, and the fore fuselage scattered as much as 30-200 meters from the embankment,” the report mentioned, offering some new photos of the accident website.
The localiser aids navigation of an plane making an strategy to the runway, and the construction constructed of strengthened concrete and earth at Muan airport supporting the system’s antennae doubtless contributed to the excessive demise toll, specialists have mentioned.
The investigation will tear down the engines, study parts in depth, analyse in-flight and air site visitors management knowledge, and examine the embankment, localisers and proof of a chicken strike, the report mentioned about its subsequent steps.
“These all-out investigation actions goal to find out the correct reason for the accident,” it mentioned.
The report highlighted a lot of the preliminary findings by the South Korean investigators that have been shared with victims’ households on Saturday, together with the pilots’ consciousness of a flock of birds on the aircraft’s closing strategy.
The precise time the chicken strike was reported by the pilots stays unconfirmed, the accident report mentioned, however the plane “made an emergency declaration (Mayday x 3) for a chicken strike throughout a go-around”.
The report doesn’t say what might have led to the cockpit voice recorder and flight knowledge recorder to cease recording concurrently simply earlier than the pilots declared the emergency.
The plane was at an altitude of 498 toes (152m) flying at 161 knots (298 km/h) about 1.1 nautical miles (2km) from the runway in the mean time the flight recorders stopped recording, it mentioned.
The Worldwide Civil Aviation Group (ICAO), a UN company, requires accident investigators to supply a preliminary report inside 30 days of the accident and encourages a closing report back to be made public inside 12 months.
South Korea’s Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board has shared its report with ICAO, Thailand, the USA and France, that are the house states of the aircraft and engine producers, an official mentioned on Monday.
