South Korea plane crash Why was there a wall near the runway at the airport?

Aviation experts have raised questions about an “abnormal” concrete wall near a runway and its role in a South Korea plane crash that killed 179 people.

Footage shows a Jeju Air plane skidding off the runway at Muan International Airport before hitting a wall and bursting into flames.

Authorities investigating the cause of South Korea’s worst-ever plane crash are considering the significance of the location of the concrete wall, about 250 meters (820 ft) from the end of the runway.

Air safety expert David Learmount said that if there had been no “obstruction”, the plane “would have come to rest with most of the people – possibly all – still alive”.

The pilot reported that the plane had hit a bird and then aborted the original landing and asked for permission to land in the opposite direction.

The aircraft descended some distance along the 2,800 meter runway and appeared to land without using its wheels or any other landing gear.

Mr Learmount said the landing was “as good as a flapless/gearless touchdown can be: wings level, nose not so high as to avoid tail breakage” and the aircraft suffered no significant damage due to the slide on the runway.

“The cause of the deaths of so many people was not the landing, but the fact that the plane hit a very hard obstacle beyond the end of the runway,” he said.

Munich-based Lufthansa pilot Christian Beckert called the concrete structure “unusual”, telling the Reuters news agency: “Normally, at an airport with a runway at the end, you don’t have a wall.”

According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, the concrete structure houses a navigation system that assists in landing aircraft – known as a localizer.

At a height of 4 meters, it is covered with dirt and raised locally along the runway to maintain it so it can function properly, Yonhap reported.

South Korea’s Transportation Ministry has said the equipment has been installed at other airports in the country and some overseas with concrete structures. However officials will investigate whether it should have been made of lighter material which would break more easily on impact.

Chris Kingswood, a pilot with 48 years’ experience who has flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash, told BBC News: “The obstacles are required to be brittle within a certain range and distance of the runway, which means that if someone The plane hits them so hard that they break.

“It seems unusual that it would do such a drastic thing. As far as I understand, the plane was traveling very fast, had descended well short of the runway, so it would have gone well off the end of the runway… So where do you draw the line with this? It’s definitely something that will be examined.

“Airplanes are not strong structures – by design, they are meant to be light to make them efficient in flight. They’re not really designed to move at high speed on their belly, so any type of structure that causes the fuselage Can break and then be destroyed Destructive.

“Wings are filled with fuel, so once a wing breaks, there is a high potential for fire.

“So it’s not certain that the outcome would have been any different had the wall not been there.”

Mr Kingswood said he would be “surprised if the airfield does not meet all requirements as per industry standards”.

He added, “I suspect that if we were to visit the airfields at many major international airports… we would find a lot of obstacles that could be accused of posing a threat.”

Aviation analyst Sally Gethin questioned whether the pilot knew the obstacle was there, especially given that the aircraft was approaching from the opposite direction from the normal landing approach.

He told BBC News: “What we need to know is did (the pilots) know there was this hard limit at the end?

“If they were directed by the control tower to reverse the runway use for the second time, it should come out in the black box investigation.

“I think there are a lot of questions.”