Jeju Air Crash: Everything we Know So Far!

0:00 aing 737800 seemingly on a completely normal approach suddenly goes around and then minutes later ends up belly landing on the opposite Runway with terrifying results the internet is bubbling with rumors and speculation but that's not what I will give you in this video instead let's look at the things that we do know and what we can learn from it stay tuned during the months of the Christmas 202 four I have received hundreds of requests to comment on the completely unrelated aircraft accidents that have happened between December 25th and the 1st of February this year now I completely understand the need for explanations when things like this happen but I hope that you guys

0:46 understand that my team and I pride ourselves on presenting facts to you not speculation that's why I haven't created anything on these accidents yet except for covering the rescue work and any relevant breaking news through my Mentor Aviation and over on my website Mentor pilot.com but obviously here I am talking about this anyway so why is that well just like after the horrible accident of we pass flight 2283 back in August of 2024 there are things in this accident of ju flight 2216 that are clearly visible on videos and discussed in the now released interim report and those things I can talk about and explain without speculating on the ultimate cause of the disaster this include things like the

1:32 fact that this aircraft did hit birds evidently in both engines that they went around and that they clearly landed with the landing gear retracted far down the opposite Runway but before I get to that I want to explain why I won't go into speculations about the full sequence of events before we have the final report you see as strange as it might sound in this context Aviation has become extremely safe during the last few decades now this doesn't mean that it can't improve as this accident clearly shows but one of the reasons that we've gotten to this point where hundreds of thousands of flights operate millions of hours without a single accident is in part because we have learned our lessons from other accidents and

2:19 incidents we do this by employing a 100% fact driven approach to accident investigations where season accident investigators experien in everything from piloting to engineering and human factors examines the accident and start by painstakingly Gathering evidence piece by piece they do not start with a possible Theory and then try to prove it with the help of evidence instead they will let the evidence tell its own story and just like how a painting eventually reveals its true form as the process moves along the evidence will then eventually reveal the full story around an accident so once that's done a few years from now I will use that final report to tell the full story of what

3:05 happened on that day but until then rumors and speculation can actually cause some real damage here I have already seen colleagues speculating on LinkedIn and in the press and the problem with that is that once a rumor becomes accepted as the most likely truth especially after having been blown up in the media it can actually end up overshadowing the real explanation this was partially what happened in the case of lion airf Flight 610 who crashed into the Java SE soon after takeoff back in October of 2018 in that case rumors of gross pilot error started circulating only days after the accident and it was then further under blown when Boeing published a pilot bulletin highlighting that using already existing procedures was the way to deal with this issue now

3:53 there was nothing factually wrong with that but it severely underplayed the real problem which was the way that the maneuvering characteristics argumentation system mcast had been constructed and implemented on the boing 737 Max so this focus on simple pilot error ended up installing a sense of confidence in the pilot community at the time which I actually clearly remember feeling myself but then of course only a few months later another boing 727 Max went down under very similar circumstances now it is of course possible that this would have happened anyway but I cannot not shake the feeling that if the mcast problem would have been taken more seriously to begin with and the emphasis on pilot error hadn't been so widely spread well then

4:39 maybe this second accident could have been avoided so this is why I refus to speculate before the facts are known if I would do that it might be unconsciously feeding a false narrative that could in the best case scenario age like milk and in the worst be downright dangerous so having said that let's instead get back to the things that we can talk about in this case like the different systems that were obviously involved in this accident and how they work let's start with some facts around jedu flight 7c 2216 where most of the things that I will present here comes from the official interim report that was just released by the Korean authorities the aircraft used was a

5:26 15-year-old boing 737800 which had been delivered new from Factory to the European lowcost company ryion a back in 2009 and had then been transferred over to jedu Airlines in February of 2017 at the time of this flight it had registration HL 888 and was as far as we know in good technical condition jju Airlines is also a lowcost airline based in the city of juu in South Korea and it's been around since 2005 they operate mainly boing 737800 but they also have two 737 Max 8s and Orders of 40 more of those which is still to be delivered on the 29th of December 2024 this aircraft and a crew of six were scheduled to operate a flight from Bangkok suban

6:12 abomi Airport in Thailand over to muan International Airport in South Korea this light was operated by the airline four times per week especially around the Christmas holiday period and on this particular day there were 175 passengers on board in charge of the aircraft was a 45-year-old Captain who had previously served in the Air Force and he had a total flight time of over 6,800 hours with 2,500 of those operated as pilo in command we don't know the age of the first officer but we do know that he had 1,650 hours of Total time of which the vast majority 1,339 hours had been flown on the boing 737 early media reports indicate that the captain was known among his

6:58 colleagues as an unwavering professional who valued safety above everything else and even though that's in no way a guarantee for avoiding mistakes it's certainly something to keep in mind here now according to the interim report the aircraft departed normally from Bangkok at 0228 a.m. local tie time that's 1928 UTC and the flight then proceeded without incident along its flight plan route up towards its destination the flight time was expected to be in the regional 4 hours and there were no indications of anything out of the ordinary happening until the very end that is actually also quite important to remember because a long fight time like that especially when flown early in the morning can lead to

7:43 quite a low level of alertness during the cruise phase and based on my own experience it can then be quite hard to get the alertness up when it's time for the approach especially if the approach to be flown is a standard ILS approach which normally doesn't come with any big surprises but this time it definitely did now before I explain what we know here I quickly want to tell you about one tool that my team and I use in order to find out important details for videos like this today sponsor Nord vpm my script writer speos does a lot of the leg work when it comes to finding obscure articles from local newspapers from all over the world and that also means that he frequently comes up against a dreaded access denied meth message meaning that

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9:15 nordvpn has an incredible offer for you my viewers if you sign up for their 2-year plan using this QR code or by going to nordvpn.com Pilot you'll get four extra months absolutely for free free and with their 30-day money back guarantee there is really no risk in trying them out thank you n for enabling us to make investigative videos like this now let's get back to what happened on this flight muami International Airport sits very close to the coast in the middle of a wetland which makes its surrounding area a perfect nesting and feeding ground for birds of various species now airports always do their best to try and keep a bird clear of the immediate

10:00 vcinity using everything from lasers to Falcons and various other scaring techniques but the fact remains that it's sometimes impossible to keep birds away especially if the runway sits in the middle of their habitat because of that as Flight 2 to16 was descending towards the airport and was clear to land on Runway 01 at time 0854 local time Birds had evidently being noticed around the perimeter so a caution Bird activity broadcast was made on the tower frequency so how do we Pilots interpret something like that well as the wording indicate this is a caution and that basically means that we need to be on the lookout for birds and stay vigilant but it doesn't mean that we need to discontinue the approach or wait until that caution

10:46 is over birds and even flocks of birds can move quickly from one place to another so it's virtually impossible to tell where they will be as we approach and that can of course also appear when there is no caution issue so they're basically a normal part of the job as a professional pilot so in this case the aircraft just continued its approach and likely configured normally for landing rway Z 1 is under normal circumstances 2,800 M long but because of some Runway works and an extension on the North side it had been shortened to 2,500 M which is still plenty of Landing distance for a boing 77800 anyway the approach initially continued normally and was actually called on camera by an observer on the ground when at around

11:32 0858 it appears like it suddenly flew through a flock of birds in its path on the video puffs of smoke can clearly be seen coming out of its right hand number two engine and later examinations of that video also shows a small puff from the left number one engine adsb data indicates that the aircraft was at an altitude of between 500 and 900 ft when this happened which means that it would have likely been fully configured with gear down and Landing flaps at a 30 or 40° selected so what does all of this mean then well like I said bird strikes in themselves happen all the time and they very rarely have any safety impact generally they leave a patch of blood maybe some feathers and a dent but in

12:18 some rare cases they can also go into the core of the engine and cause some damage there the cfm56 engines on the boing c7800 are incredibly sturdy and have been certified to be able to withstand bird strikes from some pretty big birds while still continuing to function the few times that I have experienced engine ingestions myself it hasn't even impacted the engine parameters and the only reason that we knew that the bird had gone into the core was because of a strong smell of fried chicken either in the cockpit if the bird hit the left engine or in the cabin if it hit the right and that's because of the way that the air conditioning system is built on the 727 with the left pack feeding primarily the cockpit and the right pack primarily the

13:03 cabin in any case it's super rare that these bird strikes cause any real danger unless there are a lot of birds sitting all at once or the birds are really big there have of course been a few recorded instances where that have happened and it has led to severe engine issues and even flame outs the Miracle on the Hudson is probably the best known such event but it also happened to Ural flight 178 which ended up in a corn field in Russia as well as to a rhion a aircraft in Rome Cheno back in 2008 because of that there have been recently guidance issued to Pilots when observing large flocks of birds on the approach to be careful with how they deal with it this guidance tells us to only go around if it's obvious that this

13:49 maneuver will keep the aircraft clear of the flock of birds and if there's any doubt of that it's actually better to continue the approach and potentially fly through the flock using the configuration and power setting already set for approach now I know that that might sound counterintuitive but this way the birge might impact the engines when they're spinning at slower speeds and therefore cause less overall damage and on top of that the aircraft will also likely be in a better position to land from that situation rather than having to reverse a go around decision but that's of course in a scenario where the pilots clearly see the flock and it's not 100% clear to me if this guidance is universal or if certain airlines have their own or maybe no guidance at all if that is the case

14:36 then a go around could well be the natural thing to do when a threat like this is noticed now I know that there will be questions about why aircraft don't have a fine mesh in front of the engines to protect against these things and I've actually made a video about that a long time ago which you can check out here but in short it's just not economically or even aerodynamically possible to do that so back to flight 2216 a few seconds after the video recorded what looks like bird impacts on both engines the adsb data from the flight indicates a small increase in altitude before the signal abruptly disappears at the same time at 0959

15:21 local one of the pilots made a radio call where he declared mayday mayday mayday and bird strike bird strike go around now declaring Mayday because of a bird strike is not very common unless there is a reason for it like indications of system Mal functions in the cockpit and the fact that the adsb signal disappeared immediately after the initiation of the go around and that we now know that the two flight data recorders also stopped recording around this time time that's potentially indicative of some sort of major electrical failure and I'll get back to why that is soon anyway on only a minute later flight 2216 had already started the go around but Witnesses on the ground stated that the aircraft seemed to have problems maintaining

16:07 altitude the pilot now also requested to land on the opposite Runway Runway 1 n which was promptly approved by the tower controller so there is a lot to unpack here so let's start with what we can say for sure which is that the aircraft did go around and that it did hit birds we know that because the pilots reported it and because the Korean authorities have reported that pieces of birds have now been found inside of both engines pieces of ball teals to be exact now when we go around in the boing 737 we generally do so using the following procedure the pil of flying decides to go around and then hits the toga buttons while calling go around flaps 15 followed by set go around

16:53 trust the pilot monitoring will then verify that the speed is safe for flat protraction move the flap lever to the 15° gate and then make sure that the trust levers have moved into the correct go around setting if the outer thrott is engaged it will normally automatically move the trust levels to the reduced goon trust which is around 90% N1 and that should give the aircraft a nice and smooth climb rate of around 1,500 to 2,000 ft per minute the next thing that will happen is that the pal flying will check that the aircraft is climbing and ask for the gear to be retracted which normally happens within second seconds after the start of the go around so what would happen in case of some kind of engine problems then well if an engine failure would happen on Final Approach

17:39 before the go around decision is taken well then the pilot flying would first make sure that he keeps control of the aircraft and if that's possible and he can maintain the approach stabilized well then he can actually continue using the existing configuration he has another option that can happen is that the crew feels like they can't keep the aircraft stabilized anymore and therefore chooses to go around to sort out the problem in most circumstances they will then be able to just return for a normal briefed and prepared single engine approach which is something that all Pilots are well trained for now in case of a go around from an engine failure with flaps 30 or 40 set the speed is too low to reduce the flaps directly to the flaps one setting which is the normal single engine gound

18:24 setting so standard flaps 15 can then be used instead now you might ask why this would be important but remember I'm only giving you information about what pilots in general are trained to do when faced with this kind of a scenario I'm not saying that this is what the pilots of this flight actually did in any case so far I've only explained what would happen if we lose one engine while on approach I haven't mentioned what we would do in case we lose both engines and that's for a very good reason you see there is no real procedure for handling a dual engine failure approach other than making sure that we don't let the air speed go so low that the aircraft stalls obviously with no engines the aircraft would quickly lose energy and it's better to land short of the runway but with the wings still

19:10 flying than trying to extend the Glide by bleeding off the Speed and anding up stalling it now the pilot monitoring will obviously do the memory items to try to restore trust from at least one engine but if there's no time for that well then there's not much to do other than trying to make the best out of the situ situation there have fortunately been very few examples of dual engine failures on approach the only one that comes to my mind is British Airway flight 38 which I covered in this video and the only real lesson we can draw from that accident was that even though they retracted the flaps to extend the Glide that is not what boing recommends since again that could lead to the aircraft stalling the truth here is that it will be up to the captain how this is going to be handled because a dual engine

19:57 failure on a two engine jet is obviously a catastrophic emergency now I will get back to this soon because I have in my role as a typew rating instructor and examiner practice these type of scenarios with pilots in the simulator and the observations I made there might be very interesting for you in relation to this accident but before we get to that let's first discuss some of the systems on the 737 that almost certainly have been involved here let's start with the adsb transponder and the black boxes the cockpit voice and flight data recorder the transponder is in essence a radio box that communicates with air traffic control as well as with other aircraft around and each flight get issued a

20:44 specific four number identification code from air traffic control which we Pilots then dial into that box and this code then helps ATC distinguish us from other aircraft but this transponder also sends out information in the form of automatic dependent surveillance broadcast adfb and it's because of that that we can follow aircraft on services like Flight Radar 24 for example now the boing 737800 have two separate transponders which typically are switched towards the pilot flying so if the captain is flying transponder number one will be used and if the first officer is flying transponder number two now interesting here is that in case of a complete loss of generators certain systems will continue to work using the two onboard batteries and one of those systems is

21:30 transponder number one other systems that will also continue to work up to 1 hour after a complete loss of generators are the captain's instrument displays radio number one as well as several different Warning Systems but not necessarily external lighting remember that now like I mentioned before the adsb transmission from the aircraft stopped working around time 2358 and 42 seconds and then both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder also stopped within about 10 seconds from that now that is very strange because at least transponder number one should continue to work regardless of engines running as long as the batteries were working properly but there is of course a possibility that it was the first officer who was pilot flying in which case the transponder number two

22:17 would just stop now we do know that the pilots made that radio call declaring emergency and then later asking for landing on the opposite Runway meaning that some systems were clearly working here but the interim report doesn't specify if these calls were made before or after the recorder stopped working so from this point we are in the dark about what actually happened in the cockpit and what actions that the pilots might have taken and the sad truth is that without those recorders it will be very hard to ever know that exactly but there are still some more details that we can find out if we just understand a few more Technical Systems here so first off we have the flaps do during a go around we would like I mentioned before start by retracting them from The Landing

23:02 flaps 30 or 40 to 15 flaps 15 is the standard two engine go around flap and that's why it has a pronounced gate on the flap handle selector if we're flying a single engine approach then flap 15 would be the landing flap and therefore we would retract the flaps to one in a gon which is why that's the next gate on the selector now once we've done that first retraction and Are Climbing away above 400 ft we would then continue to retract the flaps and accelerate to clean up the aircraft and the only time that we would wait any longer than that is in case of an engine failure in which case we would generally wait until we're above about 1,000 ft above the ground before we'd retract from flaps one two flaps up in any case this means that

23:49 above about 1,300 ft or so we would under normal circumstances be flying with a clean aircraft with all the flaps completely retracted the reason that I'm mentioning this is because in the videos that we've seen from the jedu accident the Leading Edge flaps seems to be fully retracted and that would only be the case if the trailing Edge flaps are also up so together this means that the flaps must have been retracted during the go around now the flaps are normally using the hydraulic B system for extansion and retraction but if there is no hydraulic power available well then the trailing edges can still be extended and retracted using an electric motor and the leading edges can be extended using the standby hydraulic system but both of these standby systems require AC power

24:35 to work remember that okay so the next system that we then get to is the landing gear on the boing 737 the landing gear is hydraulically operated using the hydraulic a system to move it we have a big gear leveler in the front Central panel of the cockpit and it has six indicator lights above it showing either green meaning that the gear is down and locked or red if the gear is not down and locked with either or both trust levels to idle and Below 800 ft or if the related gear is in disagreement with the landing gear level position there's also a separate independent Set of Lights in the AF overhead panel showing the same thing and a green light on any of those panels means that the related gear is down and

25:21 locked now since the gear extension and retraction is hydraulically operated there's also a manual extension option that can be used use in case of a complete loss of the hydraulic a system and that manual extension is very simple it basically consists of physical wires drawn from the gear up locks to the cockpit and in order to use them a hatch has to First be open in the cockpit floor behind the center pedestal and then each of the three handles has to be pulled out until you feel the uplock release after that the gear will then free fall down and lock into position using good old gravity but actually using this manual release system is very rare and really only practiced in the simulator every 3 years or so so in a state of panic it

26:08 might not become immediately obvious that this would be needed especially since the normal gear lever would still come down when selected it just wouldn't do anything and the only way to notice that would be the absence of green lights and the presence of red lights on the indicator panel potentially also accompanied with a onetone landing gear warning below 800 ft but that warning wouldn't say landing gear like it would on other more modern aircraft it would just be a One Tone so this then brings us to the hydraulic system since Hydraulics are used to both move the flaps and retract the normally extend the gear the hydraulic system on the boing 737 comprises of two separate systems as well as a standby system there is a lot to say about this

26:55 but what's relevant to know in this case is that it's powered by two pumps for each system one electric pump and one engine driven pump there is also a brake pressure accumulator but that doesn't really make any difference here because the gear was never extended the engine driven pumps are as the name suggest driven by the respective engines with the left engine number one providing pressure for the a system and the right engine number two for the B system these engine pumps provide the same pressure but about six times the volume of the electric pumps meaning that if an engine fails the system operated by the failed engine's hydraulic pump will move slower and still work but that's providing that there is AC Electrical Power available since the electric pumps are using that

27:42 to function if there's no engine working and there's no normal AC electric Source well then there will be no hydraulic power either and that finally brings us to the Electric System this is quite simple on the 7 there are basically three generators available plus two batteries which can run a certain number of essential systems for a minimum of 60 minutes because those batteries are there the 737 does not have a ram air turbine rat like for example the Airbus A320 has the two normal generators we use are connected to the engines and are providing the aircraft with AC power to all of its different electrical buses during flight providing that those engines are working the third generator

28:28 is the auxiliary power unit the Apu but that has to be started separately in the air in order to provide Power if all generators would fail well then the AC standby bus would be fed from the batteries via an inverter and the battery DC buses will be fed directly from the batteries but obviously the amount of systems that can be fed by those are the absolute minimum possible and that doesn't include the hydraulic pumps instruments for the fo the cabin and galy Light liting nor the external lights what is powered is like I said before the number one transponder radio number one the captain's instruments and a lot of other stuff that won't be important for this story at least as far as we now know but what all of this means is that unless a generator becomes

29:15 available the normal gear extension does not work the flap extension does not work the spoilers on the wings doesn't work the reversers doesn't work and crucially neither does the hydraulic activators for the flight controls so if all AC power is lost then the aircraft must be flown using something known as manual reversion that's where the flight controls are manipulated purely by muscle power by the pilot through wires and pulley connecting the Yoke and the control column directly to the control surfaces doing that is very hard work and it's often slow to get the aircraft to react to the input meaning that it often starts getting into these s-like turns as the inputs are continuously

30:00 overcorrected and on one of those videos that have been taken of this incident when the aircraft was on Final Approach it was indeed flying those kind of small s turns but again that could be caused by other reasons as well now what about the black boxes the flight data recorder and the cookit voice recorder surely they must be powered by the battery somehow and the answer to that is yeah yes now they are since around 2010 new boing 77s have been upgraded with the flight data recorder being connected to the battery boss and a cockpit voice recorder having a system known as recorder independent power supply rips that system includes its own battery that can supply the

30:47 recorder with power for up to 10 minutes in case of a complete power failure but this aircraft was manufactured in 2009 which means that it might not have been equipped with rips and this upgrade so knowing all of that let's now have a further look at what we know from the intern report as well as what we can see from the videos the aircraft clearly hit birds again that's confirmed by the interim report and the Pilot's initial Mayday call it then started climbing whilst at least one more radio call was made and around that time the transponder signal cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder stopped working it must have then continued to climb for a while for reasons that I will soon come to to but according to the interim report it then turned left for an immediate right hand

31:32 circuit for the opposite Runway Runway 1 19 a few minutes later it subsequently landed about 1,200 m in on the 2,800 M long Runway with the gear and flaps still retracted the whole Landing was captured on camera and what we can see is that on top of the aircraft Landing far in on the runway the speed was also quite High which makes sense if the flaps were up as the clean speed of a 737800 would be around 200 knots or 370 kmph during the landing the tail of the aircraft can be seen impacting the runway first followed by the right engine as Cel and then the left it then continued sliding on the the cells along what was left of the paved Runway after which it exited Runway and continued at

32:19 very high speed across the 300 M of clearway that was still remaining finally the aircraft impacted a concrete wall on which the localizer antenna for the ILS array was mounted due to the very high speed this impact became extremely violent and ended up completely destroying the aircraft all but two people on board was immediately killed and the two survivors were sitting in the AFT back part of the aircraft again I want to really emphasize that the interim report did not specify any actions by the two pilots nor any real technical information that could explain why all of this has happened so any given combination of actions and Technical malfunctions are still possible and hopefully the investigators will be able

33:05 to pule this all together even without the flight recorders but just to show you how complicated this sequence can be let me give you some information based on my own experience as a typew rating examiner and instructor in that role my colleagues and I frequently did something known in my Airline as survival training this consisted of non-graded exercises meaning that the students that were flying did not receive any type of grades on how they performed so the idea was to give them real nightmare scenarios in order to see how they reacted and then debrief those exercises in the simulator giving some helpful tips on how to think and act if this would ever happen for real the reason

33:51 these exercises were not graded was because they combined several folds at once going outside of what the pilots would be expected to master but they were always plausible scenarios and since it was neither pre-brief nor expected the crews got a chance to see how they would react complete with startle factor and everything now one of the scenarios that we did included bird strikes to both Indians of the departure followed by a loss of both engion with all the problems that came with that and when running that scenario it quickly became clear that the roles in the cockpit had to be quickly separated for it to work with the pallet monitoring initially focusing on doing the memory items for loss of trust on both engines in order to try and facilitate a relight

34:36 and then to assist the pet flying with anything needed and the pet flying which would always become the captain since the instruments would initially only be available on that side must immediately concentrate on flying the aircraft and start making up some kind of a plan the up speed would give the best Glide Rao with the flaps retracted and it is super important to start looking for a possible landing spot as early as possible in case none of the engines would end up relighting but when doing these exercises it also became obvious pretty quickly that unless the auxiliary power unit the Apu was started almost immediately flying became very hard since all that the pilots were then left with was manual reversion as well as all of the other problems that I explained

35:22 before some Crews figured this out quite quickly and started the Apu without waiting for that up in a nonnormal checklist similar to what Su did in the miracle of the Hudson but the crews who didn't do that would be in for a very complicated exercise first of all a lot of altitude is required to accomplish a 180° turn without engines on average the crews would lose around 1,800 ft doing that this is why I was saying earlier that a crew in this accident must have been able to climb at least a bit because what we saw in the simulator was that if the pilots didn't start turning back almost immediately or if the bird strike happened at too low altitude well then getting back to the runway wasn't even an option and here comes another very

36:09 interesting observation that we made because of what I just explained most Pilots would prefer to turn back almost immediately even if that meant ending up very high for the landing they assumed quite correctly that if they just put the gear down together with the flaps and then landed with a slightly high high speed well then the brakes would still be able to stop them and coming in slightly hot and high would therefore be much better than not reaching the runway at all but that strategy only worked if the Apu was selected on and used for electrical and therefore also hydraulic power without that if they even managed to turn the aircraft around with manual reversion neither the gear nor the flaps or spoilers would work and that fact would

36:55 only then be noticed quite late in in the sequence now the manual gear extension would still work but remembering that among the general chaos that ensued is not as easy as it sounds so this would generally mean that the ones who didn't manage to get the Apu generator engaged ended up high on the approach with a high speed and then obviously couldn't get the gear or flaps down to help reduce it nor the spoilers of the landing and if the gear is not down the brakes are obviously of no use either so in that scenario since the spoilers then stayed flush with the wings off the touchdown together with a high speed it meant that the wings continued producing lift keeping the weight of the aircraft away from the ground and that in turn

37:40 caused the aircraft to basically just skim along the ground on the engine the cells now that would decelerate the aircraft slightly but not nearly as much as it would with a gear and brakes available nor would the spoilers engaged and together these factors would combine to co was a very long Landing distance again these are just observations I've made in the simulator after having administered surprise dual engan failures for years and it might have no bearing at all on this particular case but I thought that it would be interesting to share these observations anyway just to give you a sense of the complexity here in any case most Crews really appreciated this type of training since it highlighted just how important priorities areas of

38:27 respons posibility and decisive action really is as well as the importance of starting the Apu if it is available so then what else can we see from the videos that have been posted online can we learn anything from them and what might the investigators be looking at but one thing that stood out to me was the almost complete lack of external lights on all of the videos that are available except for one very noticeable exception that I will soon get to you see under normal circumstances a boy 737 on approach will have all the forward-facing lights illuminated that includes Landing lights Runway turnoff lights taxi lights the red and green lab lights together with the flashing white

39:12 strobe lights on the wing tips and the mandatory anti-collision lights on the lower and upper part of the body none of those lights were visible on any of the videos that I have seen and although that can have a few different explanations the most obvious one is a lack of normal AC power which in turn could mean that none of the three available generators were working the only light that was actually illuminated on these videos is barely visible and we had to look at the videos frame by frame to spotted just behind the forward right main door that little light forms part of the emergency exit lighting which is put there to illuminate the slides in case of an evacuation now those lights are normally extinguished and can be

39:57 manually illuminated by a switch in the cockpit but they also illuminate automatically in case of a loss of AC power so the combination of no normal lights and the emergency exit lights being illuminated again could potentially Point towards a lack of AC power the reason behind which is still to be determined but the fact that there were no flaps no spoilers and that the landing gear never came down also kind of points in the same direction all of these systems are connected in one way or another as I just explained now one thing that is a bit harder to explain is that in one of the videos it looks like the reverser on the right side was activated in case there was no hydraulic power that reverser should not have been

40:43 opened but on the other hand the fact that the aircraft was skidding on that part of the engine could also just have forced it open especially if the revers levers in the cockpit were activated by the pilots in a reflex response now in that video I couldn't see the normal reverser plume around the engine and that could indicate that there was no reverse trust being generated this is one of those things that the investigators will be looking closely at and we will have to wait and see what they finally come up with another thing that I'm really looking forward to hear from the final report is when and if the AC power stopped working because since the adsb transmissions and the two recorders sto working almost immediately after the decision to go around this would indicate a possible dual endium failure at that point but the aircraft

41:30 must have continued to climb for a while if the flaps were to be retracted and enough altitude attained for a 180° turn back now I guess that if the two engines were surging badly enough but not failing due to the bird ingestion that could cause the N2 drops to be big enough to trip the generators but again this is a part of the story that I'm really looking forward to learn more about but one one thing that I really did react to was the rudder you see when the aircraft touched down and started skidding down the runway any obstacle ahead of the aircraft would have been in Clear Sight of the pilots and if a concrete barrier is coming towards you Pilots would instinctively try to turn

42:15 away from it with no nose wheel steering available since the gear was not down the only way to control the aircraft's trajectory would have been through deflecting the rudder in the back but as far as I could see on the videos that we have available that Rudder remained completely flushed with the tail fin until the very end again with manual reversion meaning a loss of both primary hydraulic systems the rudder still would had redundancy through the standby hydraulic system but there are no wires connecting the rudder pedals directly to the rudder like there is with the aerons and elevators so this assumes that there is still some kind of AC Electrical Source available if that is not the case well then the standby

43:01 hydraulic system is not powered either meaning that the rudder won't move and if that was the case the pilots would have had no control of the aircraft trajectory of the landing again these are all just observations from the videos and explanations of the systems behind there are multiple combinations of actions and inactions that can lead to the same outcome so I'm really looking forward to hear what the investigation ultimately show and finally we get to the issue with the concrete barrier which the aircraft ultimately collided with now whilst it's obviously not ideal to have any kind of obstacle in the extended Center Line of a Runway the importance of this barrier has in my view been

43:46 extremely overblown the runway that the aircraft landed on was originally 2,800 M long and had 300 M of clearway on this day it was only 2,500 M due to some Runway works but this is still quite a lot of Runway with ample distance available for an aircraft to safely stop on airports are certified according to very strict criteria when it comes to the height of obstacles which are allowed and I would be very surprised if this barrier didn't easily fulfill those requirements you have to understand that an airport cannot be built in order to facilitate every conceivable scenario an aircraft touching down around halfway down the runway at an extremely high speed without its landing gear or

44:32 anything else helping it to slow down would be a great example of that and if you think about it what if this exact scenario would have happened at an airport like Chicago Midway instead well then there would have been no concrete barrier instead the aircraft would have continued straight out into a busy urban area potentially leading to an even bigger disaster I have no idea of what speed the aircraft had when it impacted the concrete wall here but if that wall hadn't been there it would have certainly continued for a long distance still and likely hit something else instead so yes the obvious thing for media and people to blame was that wall but in reality as always things are way more complicated than that there are

45:17 literally so many questions that still remain around this accident like why did the crew decide to go around in the first place what actions took place in the cockpit during the subsequent circuit and exactly why did the flight recorders stop when they did now this is up to the investigation team to try and figure out but it will be an uphill battle for them without the black boxes the reason I made this video was because of the overwhelming amount of questions that you guys sent me and because the interim report has now been released so I felt that I could share some of the things that I noticed as well as my own experience of this aircraft I will never speculate on the absolute cause of an accident before the investigation team has given their final verdict but one thing that I think I can say without a

46:04 shadow of a doubt is that these Pilots faced something almost unimaginable here were there mistakes made probably they're almost always are but what we now need to do is to await the final report and then start working ways to avoid any other Pilots finding themselves in a similar situation and I will obviously follow this video up when that coms now one way that I recommend you to stay up to date with this as well as with other important Aviation events is by checking out ground news a longtime sponsor and the tool that I personally use in order to do some of my research so that I can see what's going on from several different viewpoints and you can follow along by going to ground. news/ MP the

46:49 world we live in just keeps getting more and more polarized which makes finding reliable sources harder for every day that goes by and the story of this accident is no exception as you can see here while over 250 Sorcerers worldwide have reported on this story 14% of them are government owned including from Korea itself and this limited representation highlights the contrast in media representation overall different sources highlight different aspects of the story shaping your perception of what happened which is why I use ground news for a more complete perspective now to get the same Vantage plan that I am using just scan this QR code or go to ground. newm that will give you access at nearly half the

47:36 normal price just $5 per month which it's really worth trust me so in order to access the discounts from both of my sponsors on this episode check out the links in the video description here below and if you want to continue watching more of my content may I suggest this video next which is super interesting thank you ground news and nordvpn for sponsoring this video my name is Peter hefel and you're watching Mentor pilot have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye-bye