Investigators are searching for why Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 crashed on Sunday in South Korea. The fiery runway crash killed 179 people onboard. There were only two survivors, flight attendants sitting in jump seats at the back of the plane. Their seat positions during the catastrophic incident likely saved their lives.
The flight’s demise began when the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 suffered an apparent bird strike as it approached Muan International Airport. The flight crew declared a Mayday and attempted an emergency landing. However, the landing was aborted after the landing gear failed to deploy. The plane went around and performed a belly landing. It was executed perfectly, as the Boeing slid down the runway on the fuselage’s underside with minimal damage to the rest of the aircraft.
At any major international airport, Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 would have slid past the end of the runway into an empty glass field. According to the BBC, a concrete wall bolstered by a dirt mount was 820 feet beyond the runway. The plane smashed into the earthen structure and was obliterated in a heap of flame and debris. The BBC spoke with air safety expert David Learmount:
Mr Learmount said the landing was “as good as a flapless/gearless touchdown could be: wings level, nose not too high to avoid breaking the tail” and the plane had not sustained substantial damage as it slid along the runway.
“The reason so many people died was not the landing as such, but the fact that the aircraft collided with a very hard obstruction just beyond the runway end,” he said.
During the impact, the tail section was violently ripped from the rest of the fuselage at around the last row of seats. The rear galley was spared from the crash’s worst destruction. The two attendants, a man and a woman, seated in the galley survived and were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
While paying passengers don’t have access to the jump seats, data defends the notice that the plane’s rear is the safest place to sit. A Time investigation stated that middle rear seats have a 28 percent fatality rate in accidents, the lowest of anywhere on an airliner. These findings were reached after combing through 35 years of aircraft accident data. Commercial plane crashes are still an incredibly rare occurrence but some flyers want to play it as safe as possible.