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Probe report suggests pilots responsible for South Korean plane crash, drawing protests from victims' families

Probe report suggests pilots responsible for South Korean plane crash, drawing protests from victims' families

CBS News3 days ago
The initial results of an investigation into December's devastating Jeju Air crash in South Korea showed that, while the plane's both engines sustained bird strikes, its pilots turned off the less-damaged one just before its crash-landing. The finding, which implied human errors, drew quick, vehement protests from bereaved families and fellow pilots who accuse authorities of trying to shift responsibility for the disaster to the dead pilots.
South Korea's Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board initially planned to publicize the results of an investigation of the plane's engines on Saturday. But it was forced to cancel its press briefing in the face of strong protests by relatives of crash victims who were informed of the findings earlier in the day, according to government officials and bereaved families.
"If they want to say their investigation was done in a reliable, independent manner, they should have come up with evidence that backs up their explanation," said Kim Yu-jin, head of an association of bereaved families. "None of us resent the pilots."
The Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air landed on its belly without its land gear deployed at South Korea's southern Muan International Airport on Dec. 29. It overshoot a runaway, slammed into a concrete structure and burst into flames. It was the deadliest disaster in South Korea's aviation history in decades, killing all but two of the 181 people on board.
According to a copy of an unpublished briefing report obtained by The Associated Press, a South Korean-led multilateral investigation team said it found no defects in the plane's engines built by France's Safran and GE.
The report said thorough examinations of the engines found the plane's right engine suffered more serious internal damage following bird strikes as it was engulfed with big fires and black smoke. But the pilots switched off the plane's left engine, the report said citing probes on the cockpit voice recorder, the flight data recorder and the engines examinations.
Officials earlier said the black boxes of the Boeing jetliner stopped recording about four minutes before the accident, complicating investigations into the cause of the disaster. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder cited in the briefing report refers to data stored before the recording stopped.
The report didn't say why the pilots shut off the less-damaged engine and stopped short of saying whether it was an error by the pilots.
Bereaved families and pilots at Jeju Air and other airlines lambasted the investigation findings, saying authorities must disclose the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder.
"We, the 6,500 pilots at civilian airlines, can't contain our seething anger against the preposterous argument by the Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board that lost neutrality," the Korean Pilot Unions Alliance said in a statement Tuesday.
Unionized pilots at Jeju Air also issued a statement urging authorities to present scientific evidence to show the plane should have landed normally if it flew with the less-damaged engine.
The latest report focused only on engine issues and didn't mention other factors that could also be blamed for the crash. Among them is the concrete structure the plane crashed into. It housed a set of antennas called localizers designed to guide aircraft safely during landings, and many analysts say it should have been made with more easily breakable materials. Some pilots say they suspect the government wouldn't want to mainly and prominently blame the localizers or bird strikes for mass deaths as the Muan airport is under direct management of the Transport Ministry.
The Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board and the Transport Ministry have offered no public response to the criticism. They said they also won't publicly discuss the engine investigations to respect demands by bereaved families.
A person familiar with the investigation told the AP that authorities are looking at the localizers and other issues like whether air traffic controllers relayed the danger of bird strikes to the pilots swiftly enough and what emergency training Jeju Air offered to pilots. The person, who requested anonymity citing the sensitive nature of the investigation, said authorities earlier planned to publicize the results of probes after reviewing various issues, but changed the plan and tried to release the outcome of engine investigations at the request of bereaved families. He said authorities don't intend to lay the responsibility for the disaster to the pilots.
Authorities aim to publish the investigation's final results by next June, the person said.
But Kwon Bo Hun, dean of Aeronautics College at the Far East University in South Korea, called the government's planned announcement "clumsy" because it didn't disclose evidence that supported its finding on the pilots. He said it only irritated "emotional parts of us that the investigation puts the whole blame on dead people."
A former Transport Ministry-turned-university professor reached by the AP said the engine investigation report must be "reliable" as it's based on an analysis of cockpit voice and flight data recorders that "don't lie." He spoke on condition of anonymity citing the delicate nature of the issue.
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In buildings with poor soundproofing, 'inter-floor noise' between units is such a universal scourge that the government runs a noise-related dispute resolution center while discouraging people from angrily confronting their neighbors, a situation that occasionally escalates into headline-making violence. Some apartment buildings have proved to be too much even for a country accustomed to unsentimentally efficient forms of housing. One 19-story, 4,635-unit complex built by a big-name apartment brand in one of the wealthiest areas of Seoul looks so oppressive that it has become a curiosity, mocked by some as a prison or chicken coop. The sheer number of apartments has prompted criticism of Seoul's skyline as sterile and ugly. South Koreans have described its uniform, rectangular columns as 'matchboxes.' And despite the aspirations attached to them, there is also a wariness about a culture where homes are built in such disposable, assembly line-like fashion. 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Though many branded apartment complexes now resemble gated communities with exclusionary homeowner associations, Jung points out that on the whole, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently encouraged more social mixing between classes, a physical closeness that creates the sense that everyone is inhabiting the same broader space. Even Seoul's wealthiest neighborhoods feel, to an extent that is hard to see in many American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier often means having a nicer apartment, but an apartment all the same, existing in the same environs as those in a different price range. 'And even though we occasionally use disparaging terms like 'chicken coop' to describe them, once you actually step inside one of those apartments, they don't feel like that at all,' Jung said. 'They really are quite comfortable and nice.' *** None of this, however, has been able to stave off Seoul's own present-day housing affordability crisis. The capital has one of the most expensive apartment prices in the world on a price-per-square-meter basis, ranking fourth after Hong Kong, Zurich and Singapore, and ahead of major U.S. cities like New York or San Francisco, according to a report published last month by Deutsche Bank. One especially brutal stretch recently saw apartment prices in Seoul double in four years. Part of the reason for this is that apartments, with their standardized dimensions, have effectively become interchangeable financial commodities: An apartment in Seoul is seen as a much more surefire bet than any stock, leading to intense real estate investment and speculation that has driven up home prices. 'Buying an apartment here isn't just buying an apartment. The equivalent in the U.S. would be like buying an ideal single-family home with a garage in the U.S., except that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,' said Chae Sang-wook, an independent real estate analyst. 'In South Korea, people invest in apateu for capital gains, not cash flow from rent.' Some experts predict that, as the country enters another era of demographic upheaval, the dominance of apartments will someday be no more. If births continue to fall as dramatically as they have done in recent years, South Koreans may no longer need such dense housing. The ongoing rise of single-person households, too, may chip away at a form of housing built to hold four-person nuclear families. But Chae is skeptical that this will happen anytime soon. He points out that South Koreans don't even like to assemble their own furniture, let alone fix their own cars — all downstream effects of ubiquitous apartment living. 'For now, there is no alternative other than this,' he said. 'As a South Korean, you don't have the luxury of choosing.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword

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