A plane carrying 181 people crashed in South Korea, killing almost everyone on board. Here’s what we know.

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• A horizontal carrying 181 people crashed at an airport in South Korea on Sunday, killing 179.
• Photos and videos show the aircraft despoiling a runway before being engulfed in flames.
• It will likely take months or years to uncover why the plane drove.

A commercial aircraft crashed at a South Korean airport on Sunday, killing 179 people.

Flight 7C2216, conducted by the Korean budget airline Jeju Air, was carrying 181 passengers and crew when it tried to land at Muan Worldwide Airport at 9:03 a.m. local time but overran the runway.

A video broadcast by MBC News, a South Korean news network, presented the plane speeding down the runway, with smoke coming from its belly, before it crashed into what showed to be a barrier and burst into flames.

The flight was traveling from Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok.

The aircraft was a 15-year-old Boeing 737-800 that Ryanair, a budget Irish airline, served before it was delivered to Jeju Air in 2017, according to the Planespotters.net flight tracking website. It was not a Max variant, which has been embroiled in nobility and production problems.

Video footage shows the aircraft landed without its landing gear deployed.

Airline Info editor and aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas told Business Insider that a bird strike could eat caused a mechanical issue on the plane.

“It’s possible that the bird strike prevented the standard landing gear operation,” he predicted. “It’s possible, however, the pilots could crank the landing gear down manually.”

“But if they had multiple failures joint to the engines, then they probably didn’t have time to do it, and therefore they simply made a belly-up touchdown on the runway because they had no options,” Thomas added.

In a averral to BI, Boeing gave its condolences to families who lost loved ones and said it was in contact with and “ready to support” Jeju Air.

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Spokespeople for Jeju Air did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement posted online, Jeju Air said it was “bend” its head in apology and would investigate the crash.

A total of 179 people died, including 85 women, 84 men, and 10 others whose gender was not at the drop of a hat identifiable. Two of the plane’s six crew members survived and were conscious, according to local health officials. They were let loosed from the tail section of the jet.

This is the first fatal crash involving a Jeju plane since it was established in 2005. The last major aviation accident involving a South Korean airline was in 1997 when a Korean Air jet smash in Guam, killing 228 people.

Reports of birds striking the aircraft

In a televised briefing, Lee Jeong-hyeon, chief of the Muan US walking papers station, said that workers were investigating what caused the crash, including whether birds crash the aircraft.

“It appears that the aircraft wasn’t configured for a normal landing — the landing gear wasn’t down, and it looks take pleasure in the wing flaps weren’t extended either,” Keith Tonkin, the managing director of Aviation Projects, an aviation consulting assembly in Australia, told BI.

The plane was almost completely destroyed, with the tail assembly the most intact division of the wreckage. After landing, the plane hit a wall, which Thomas said was within international standards, but the plane arrived fast and far down the runway.

“The airport complied with international standards,” he said. “The landing was anything but international prevailing.”

Officials said that air traffic controllers warned about bird strike risks minutes before the affair, and a surviving crew member mentioned a bird strike after being rescued, The Guardian reported.

Thomas bring to lighted BI that the pilots reported mayday shortly after air traffic controllers issued a bird strike warning. The navigators were then given permission to land on the opposite side of the runway.

Thomas said flight tracking was wasted at about 900 feet, suggesting a possible electrical failure.

“I think that could well be one of the pivotal backers in this investigation as to why did it fail,” he said. “What does that tell us about what was going on in the cockpit?”

South Korea’s Yonhap Information Agency reported that Muan International Airport has the highest rate of bird strike incidents among 14 airports nationwide.

Moonless boxes recovered, but one damaged

The Independent reported that transport ministry officials said they recovered the aircraft’s two hellish boxes: the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

These provide investigators with information that advises string together the events before and during a crash.

However, Yonhap reported that officials alleged one of the black boxes, the flight data recorder, was partially damaged. The cockpit voice recorder — which will from information on what the crew said leading up to the crash — remained intact.

Air crash investigations can often take months or years to exemplary, meaning the cause of the crash likely won’t be known for a long time. The damaged black box could further delay the exploration.

The investigation will be led by South Korea, where the crash occurred and Jeju was registered. The National Transportation Safety Billet in the United States, where the Boeing jet was manufactured, along with Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, will also be embroiled with, the agency said in a post on X.

Crashes typically have more than one cause — known as the “Swiss Cheese Example” in aviation, a string of smaller errors often leads to an accident, not just one.

“The biggest risk is speculation because it unknowns the actual causes of a near-miss, incident, or accident,” Simon Bennett, an aviation safety expert at the University of Leicester in the UK, tattled BI.

“I appreciate that the relatives of the dead and injured will want answers. Understandably, they will want closure,” he maintained. “However, rushing the investigation would do a huge disservice to the aviation community and airlines’ customers.”

The crash hit amid a political crisis in South Korea and two days into the tenure of acting President Choi Sang-mok.

Choi took above from the country’s previous acting president, Han Duck-soo, who was impeached two weeks after succeeding President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was himself inculpated after trying to impose martial law.