Second Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 is pressured to show again over touchdown gear issues a day after 179 died in belly-landing fireball – as troopers type via 600 physique elements at crash web site

A Jeju Air flight has been forced to turn around after experiencing landing gear issues just a day after South Korea‘s deadliest airline disaster in decades.

The Boeing 737-800 involved in the latest incident was the same model as the Jeju Air plane that crashed on Sunday, killing 179 people after coming down without its landing gear engaged.

Families have faced an agonising wait for confirmation that their loved ones were among those killed in yesterday’s crash, with officials painstakingly sorting through more than 600 body parts, trying to match them together, according to reports.

At the crash site early Monday, a middle-aged man and woman kept their gaze fixed through the fence, where remnants of the plane – seats, gates, and twisted metal parts – were still scattered across the field near the charred tail.

The smell of blood continues to hang in the air as soldiers carefully comb through a field of reeds next to the runway, engaged in an apparent search for body parts.

The flight, which had been carrying 181 people from Thailand to South Korea made a mayday call and belly-landed before crashing into a barrier and bursting into flames.

Everyone on board Jeju Air Flight 2216 was killed, save two flight attendants who were pulled from the burning wreckage. The youngest victim was a three-year-old boy.

This morning, another Jeju Air flight departed Seoul’s Gimpo International Airport for Jeju island, but was forced to turn around after a landing gear issue was detected shortly after takeoff, the South Korean airline said.

‘Shortly after takeoff, a signal indicating a landing gear issue was detected on the aircraft’s monitoring system,’ Song Kyung-hoon, head of the management support office at Jeju Air, told a news conference.

‘At 6.57 am, the captain communicated with ground control, and after taking additional measures, the landing gear returned to normal operation. 

‘However, the decision was made to return to the airport for a thorough inspection of the aircraft.’

Local media reported that 21 passengers chose not to board an alternate flight to Jeju, citing concerns over safety and other reasons. 

The airline has seen a surge in customers cancelling their flight reservations since Sunday’s incident, with a total of 68,000 tickets cancelled, Yonhap news agency reports. 

Jeju Air’s 41 plane fleet includes 39 Boeing 737-800 aircraft.

Seoul said on Monday it would conduct a special inspection of all 101 Boeing 737-800 planes in operation in the country, with US investigators, possibly including from plane manufacturer Boeing, joining the probe into the crash.

‘We are reviewing plans to conduct a special inspection on B737-800 aircraft,’ said Joo Jong-wan, head of the aviation policy bureau at the South Korean transport ministry.

Joo added that the government plans to ‘implement rigorous aviation safety inspections in response to the (landing gear) incidents’.

A total of 101 aircraft, operated by six airlines using the same model as the plane that crashed on Sunday, will be ‘thoroughly reviewed’, Joo said, adding that the inspections would last until January 3.

Sunday’s crash was the worst for any South Korean airline since a 1997 Korean Air crash in Guam that killed more than 200 people, transportation ministry data showed. 

Devastated family members of the victims have been demanding answers from the authorities.

Jeon Je-young, whose daughter Mi-sook was one of 179 who died on board Jeju Airlines flight 2216, says he still cannot believe what happened.

‘When I saw the accident video, the plane seemed out of control,’ the 71-year-old father said. ‘The pilots probably had no choice but to do it. My daughter, who is only in her mid-40s, ended up like this. This is unbelievable.’

Video of the plane’s approach show it hitting a bird, before it circled the runway and attempted to land with its flaps up. Experts believe this suggests the aircraft suffered hydraulic failure, which could have also prevented the landing gear from deploying.  

Leading air safety expert David Learmount told Sky News that having a concrete wall at the end of the runway was ‘verging on criminal’ and said the collision with the wall was the ‘defining moment’ of the disaster.

He suggested that had the wall not been there, the plane would have instead hit a fence, slid over a road and likely stopped in a nearby field. 

‘I think everybody would have been alive… the pilots might have suffered some damage going through the security fence or something like that. But I even suspect they might have survived,’ Mr Learmount said. 

Airline pilots also chimed in, saying that the jet likely lost power on at least one engine and suffered a hydraulic failure after the plane was hit by a bird.

After abandoning a first landing attempt due to a loss of power, the pilots touched down on the runway at high speed on their second attempt – without extending the flaps and deploying speed brakes that would normally slow the plane down. 

The thrust reverser, used to slow down the aircraft once on the ground, was only deployed on one engine. 

While the flaps and landing ear are powered by the hydraulic system, they can be extended manually in an emergency.

Captain Denys Davydov, who flies a Boeing 737-800 for Ukraine International Airlines, told the Times: ‘It seems they had hydraulics to deploy the one reverser but no flaps or landing gear… As a pilot of the same plane, it’s very strange.’

Some experts said that a bird strike alone would not have crippled the landing gear.

Australian airline safety expert Geoffrey Dell said: ‘I’ve never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from being extended.’ 

Airline News editor Geoffrey Thomas said that bird strikes ‘typically don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves’ and questioned why firefighters didn’t attend to the aircraft as it was landing on the runway.

He said: ‘Why weren’t they in attendance when the plane touched down? And why did the aircraft touch down so far down the runway? And why was there a brick wall at the end of the runway?’

But Joo Jong-wan dismissed concerns about having the concrete wall after the end of the runway, saying that both ends of the runway have ‘safety zones with green buffer areas before reaching the outer wall’, the Independent reports.

He added that the airport was designed ‘according to standard aviation safety guidelines, even if the wall may appear closer than it actually is’.