South Korea orders airports to install bird detection cameras

All South Korean airports will need to install bird detection cameras and thermal imaging radars after an air accident in December last year, killing 179 people.

The rollout is scheduled to take place in 2026.

Investigators said last week that they found evidence of a bird strike on the Boeing 737–800 aircraft – with wings and blood stains found on both engines of the aircraft.

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The Land Ministry said in a statement on Thursday, “Bird detection radars will be installed at all airports to implement the distant birds and improve the response capabilities for the aircraft.”

Bird detection radar detects the size of birds and their movement paths and relay this information for air traffic controllers.

The ministry said that all airports would need to be equipped with at least one thermal imaging camera.

Currently only four airports in South Korea are equipped with thermal imaging cameras. It is not clear that any of them have bird detection radars.

The sites that attract birds, such as nonsense dump, should also be moved away from airports.

Earlier last month, South Korea announced that seven airports would have their runway security sector which were customized after reviewing all the countries of the country after the accident.

The cause of the accident is still unknown, but air safety experts earlier stated that the number of casualties could be very low if not for the structure that the aircraft crashed after an emergency landing.

On December 29, the aircraft took off from Bangkok from the budget airline Jeju Air and was flying to the Muan International Airport in the south-west of the country.

Around 08:57 Local times, pilots, three minutes after creating contact with the airport, the control tower advised the crew to be vigilant with “bird activity”.

At 08:59, the pilot reported that the aircraft had hit a bird and indicated the day.

The pilot then requested permission to descend from the opposite direction, during which he stomach up without deploying his landing gear. It overtook the runway and exploded after slamming into the concrete structure, a preliminary investigation report.

Flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped recording four minutes before the disaster, an investigation of the later black box found.

The Boeing B737–800 aircraft had 179 passengers between three and 78 years of age, although most of them were in the 40, 50s and 60s. Two cabin crew members were left only.