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The initial results of an investigation into December’s devastating Jeju Air crash in South Korea showed that while both of the plane’s engines sustained bird strikes, the pilots turned off the less-damaged one just before its crash-landing.
The findings on Tuesday, which implied human error, quickly sparked vehement protests from bereaved families and fellow pilots who accused authorities of trying to shift responsibility for the disaster to the deceased pilots.
South Korea’s Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board initially planned to publicise the results of the 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.
“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.”
According to a copy of an unpublished briefing report obtained by the AP news agency, a South Korean-led multilateral investigation team said it found no defects in the plane’s engines built by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 by fire.
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 examinations of both engines.
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 slam the probe
Bereaved families and pilots at Jeju Air and other airlines blasted 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.
Unionised 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 localisers 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 blame the localisers or bird strikes for mass deaths as 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.
Authorities aim to publish the investigation’s final results by next June, a person familiar with the investigation said.
The Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air landed on its belly without its landing gear deployed at South Korea’s southern Muan International Airport on 29 December.
It overshot the 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.
Additional sources • AP