Initial probe into South Korea's Jeju Air crash hints at pilot error, angering families
South Korea's Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board initially planned to publicize the results of an 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 and bereaved families.
'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.'
The Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air landed on its belly without its land gear deployed at South Korea's southern Muan International Airport on Dec. 29. It overshoot a 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.
Investigation signals pilots turned off a wrong engine
According to a copy of an unpublished briefing report obtained by The Associated Press, a South Korean-led multilateral investigation team said it found no defects in the plane's engines built by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 with big fires and black smoke. 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 the engines examinations.
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, fellow pilots slam the probe
Bereaved families and pilots at Jeju Air and other airlines lambasted 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.
Unionized 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 localizers 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 and prominently blame the localizers or bird strikes for mass deaths as the 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.
A person familiar with the investigation told the AP that authorities are looking at the localizers and other issues like whether air traffic controllers relayed the danger of bird strikes to the pilots swiftly enough and what emergency training Jeju Air offered to pilots. The person, who requested anonymity citing the sensitive nature of the investigation, said authorities earlier planned to publicize the results of probes after reviewing various issues, but changed the plan and tried to release the outcome of engine investigations at the request of bereaved families. He said authorities don't intend to lay the responsibility for the disaster to the pilots.
Authorities aim to publish the investigation's final results by next June, the person said.
But Kwon Bo Hun, dean of Aeronautics College at the Far East University in South Korea, called the government's planned announcement 'clumsy' because it didn't disclose evidence that supported its finding on the pilots. He said it only irritated 'emotional parts of us that the investigation puts the whole blame on dead people.'
A former Transport Ministry-turned-university professor reached by the AP said the engine investigation report must be 'reliable' as it's based on an analysis of cockpit voice and flight data recorders that 'don't lie.' He spoke on condition of anonymity citing the delicate nature of the issue.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
7 hours ago
- Washington Post
What if we need spiritual revival, not technology, to address climate change
When I lived in Cambodia, I meditated at a pagoda every week. Sitting on a pillow, the numbness creeping up my legs, I tried to master control of my mind. I never succeeded. But I did discover a dawning awareness of it. Even when not sitting cross-legged in Phnom Penh, that has served me well. At times, I can deeply observe moments or myself, catching what I would have otherwise missed. In journalism, where observing is the job, it has helped me follow the questions wherever they lead, trusting the answer is not what I already (think I) know. For American scholar and activist Joanna Macy, who died at age 96 this month, early encounters with Buddhism changed not only the course of her career, but popular understanding of how we might solve the most urgent environmental issues of our time. Today, her ideas are everywhere: in the language of protesters, in discussions at scientific conferences, even at the Vatican, where Pope Francis wrote his unprecedented 2015 encyclical on the environment, 'Laudato si.' Macy applied Buddhist teachings to help people understand that they were not free-floating individuals, but integral to a much larger whole composed of every living being across time, a network as real as our veins and arteries. She encouraged people to acknowledge their feelings about the destruction of the natural world and turn their anxiety and despair into positive action. 'The key is in not being afraid for the world's suffering,' she told an interviewer. 'Then nothing can stop you.' It was a philosophy she came to call the 'Work That Reconnects,' a practice, and an organization, that thousands around the world have turned to when overwhelmed by seemingly insurmountable problems. Macy's blueprint for climate action holds that we will not be able to solve the climate issue, and its intertwined problems, with technology and policy alone. We need spiritual renewal. It's notable that a dean of the modern environmental movement has come to an identical conclusion. Gus Speth, the co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, as well as the former dean of Yale's School of the Environment (where I studied), once considered biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse and climate change to be the century's top environmental problems. 'I thought with 30 years of good science, we could address those problems,' Speth recently wrote by email. 'But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy … and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we lawyers and scientists don't know how do that.' Macy's own transformation began in the Himalayan foothills of northwest India. Growing up, she had spent idyllic summers on her grandfather's Western New York farm, an escape from what she remembers as the 'hideously confining' concrete canyons of New York City. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1950, she briefly worked for the CIA in postwar Germany, before moving to India, where she helped resettle Tibetan Buddhist refugees. Her encounters with monks fleeing Chinese persecution, and the Buddhist religion, changed her life forever. Returning to school in the mid-1970s, she earned a PhD in religious studies at 49. Her thesis, said Sean Kelly, a philosophy professor who taught with Macy at the California Institute of Integral Studies, was the first research explicitly connecting Buddhist teachings with Western systems theory. 'She looked at the Earth as a massive system of which we are a part,' Kelly said. 'The Earth is living through us and other species.' Human identity, she argued, can't be separated from the natural world — with profound moral and practical implications for how we live. During the Cold War, as nuclear weapons and waste spread around the world, Macy founded the Nuclear Guardianship project. Beyond opposing nuclear proliferation, she advocated for treating radioactive waste as a moral and cultural commitment that spanned generations. Rather than bury waste in underground tombs, she argued that societies should keep the waste in retrievable, visible storage, so future generations could monitor and maintain the safety of 'humanity's most enduring artifact' — expected to remain lethal for more than 10,000 years. As environmental crises mounted, she saw despair and fear rising in those around her. Rather than escaping into what she called a false and premature peace of mind, she accepted the reality of suffering, even embracing it, as the only way to reclaim the freedom to act. 'That became, actually, perhaps the most pivotal point in … the landscape of my life: That dance with despair,' she said on the public radio show 'On Being' in 2021. 'To see how we are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear, and that if we can be fearless, to be with our pain. … It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it.' Her argument was simple: Pain reveals what we love. The problem, she said, was when people imprisoned themselves in numbness or distraction to avoid the pain. 'Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response,' she wrote in her book 'World as Lover, World as Self.' Her genius, said Monica Mueller, an environmental studies and philosophy professor at Naropa University, was translating this idea into a practice that anyone could pick up in one of her books or 'Work That Reconnects' workshops around the world. People, especially activists, found in her teaching an antidote to burnout and apathy in the face of brutal odds. 'I've seen that time and time again,' Mueller said. 'People come in [to these workshops], literally wailing publicly, and then have something move through them and suddenly they feel they can go on.' As Macy grew older, she appeared to grow more pessimistic about our prospects of avoiding the worst of climate change and the collapse of industrial society — what she called the 'Great Unraveling.' That only redoubled her commitment to love the world and, if some of it was doomed, to give thanks for its beauty at every funeral. Despite this drumbeat of destruction, and her own pain, she could see the first green shoots of a more life-sustaining society taking hold, what she referred to as the 'Great Turning.' But hope didn't fit into her lexicon. The word doesn't exist in Buddhism's teaching, Macy taught, because it implies wishful thinking about the future, divorcing us from the present moment when we possess the power to act. Real hope, she countered, was a simple practice reliant on courage and imagination, not optimism. When people asked if she thought this would be enough, she told them they were asking the wrong question. 'When you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares?' she said. 'The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here, and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.'
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
'Absolute madness': Thailand's pet lion problem
Behind a car repair business on a nondescript Thai street are the cherished pets of a rising TikTok animal influencer: two lions and a 200-kilogram lion-tiger hybrid called "Big George." Lion ownership is legal in Thailand, and Tharnuwarht Plengkemratch is an enthusiastic advocate, posting updates on his feline companions to nearly three million followers. "They're playful and affectionate, just like dogs or cats," he told AFP from inside their cage complex at his home in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Thailand's captive lion population has exploded in recent years, with nearly 500 registered in zoos, breeding farms, petting cafes and homes. Experts warn the trend endangers animals and humans, stretches authorities and likely fuels illicit trade domestically and abroad. "It's absolute madness," said Tom Taylor, chief operating officer of conservation group Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand. "It's terrifying to imagine, if the laws aren't changed, what the situation is going to be in 10 years." The boom is fueled by social media, where owners like Tharnuwarht post light-hearted content and glamour shots with lions. "I wanted to show people... that lions can actually bond well with humans," he said, insisting he plays regularly with his pets. He entered Big George's enclosure tentatively though, spending just a few minutes being batted by the tawny striped liger's hefty paws before retreating behind a fence. Since 2022, Thai law has required owners to register and microchip lions, and inform authorities before moving them. But there are no breeding caps, few enclosure or welfare requirements, and no controls on liger or tigon hybrids. Births of protected native species like tigers must be reported within 24 hours. Lion owners have 60 days. "That is a huge window," said Taylor. "What could be done with a litter of cubs in those 60 days? Anything." - Illicit trade - Taylor and his colleagues have tracked the rise in lion ownership with on-site visits and by trawling social media. They recorded around 130 in 2018, and nearly 450 by 2024. But nearly 350 more lions they encountered were "lost to follow-up" after their whereabouts could not be confirmed for a year. That could indicate unreported deaths, an animal removed from display or "worst-case scenarios", said Taylor. "We have interviewed traders (in the region) who have given us prices for live and dead lions and have told us they can take them over the border." As a vulnerable species, lions and their parts can only be sold internationally with so-called CITES permits. But there is circumstantial evidence of illicit trade, several experts told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid angering authorities. Media reports and social media have documented lions, including cubs, in Cambodia multiple times in recent years, though CITES shows no registered imports since 2003. There is also growing evidence that captive lion numbers in Laos exceed CITES import licences. In Thailand, meanwhile, imports of lion parts like bones, skins and teeth have dropped in recent years, though demand remains, raising questions about how parts are now being sourced. Thai trader Pathamawadee Janpithak started in the crocodile business, but pivoted to lions as prices for the reptiles declined. "It gradually became a full-fledged business that I couldn't step away from," the gregarious 32-year-old told AFP in front of a row of caged cubs. She sells one-month-olds for around 500,000 baht ($15,500), down from a peak of 800,000 baht as breeding operations like hers increase supply. Captive lions are generally fed around two kilograms (4.4 pounds) of chicken carcasses a day, and can produce litters of two to six cubs, once or twice a year. Pathamawadee's three facilities house around 80 lions, from a stately full-maned nine-year-old to a sickly pair of eight-day-olds being bottle-fed around the clock. They are white because of a genetic mutation, and the smaller pool of white lions means inbreeding and sickness are common. Sometimes wrongly considered a "threatened" subspecies, they are popular in Thailand, but a month-old white cub being reared alongside the newborns has been sick almost since birth. It has attracted no buyers so far and will be unbreedable, Pathamawadee said. She lamented the increasing difficulty of finding buyers willing to comply with ownership rules. "In the past, people could just put down money and walk away with a lion... Everything has become more complicated." - Legal review - Pathamawadee sells around half of the 90 cubs she breeds each year, often to other breeders, who are increasingly opening "lion cafes" where customers pose with and pet young lions. Outside Chiang Mai, a handler roused a cub from a nap to play with a group of squealing Chinese tourists. Staff let AFP film the interaction, but like all lion cafes contacted, declined interviews. Pathamawadee no longer sells to cafes, which tend to offload cubs within weeks as they grow. She said several were returned to her traumatised and no longer suitable for breeding. The growing lion population is a problem for Thailand's Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP), admitted wildlife protection director Sadudee Punpugdee. "But private ownership has existed for a long time... so we're taking a gradual approach," he told AFP. That includes limiting lion imports so breeders are forced to rely on the domestic population. "With inbreeding on the rise, the quality of the lions is also declining and we believe that demand will decrease as a result," Sadudee said. Already stretched authorities face difficult choices on enforcing regulations, as confiscated animals become their responsibility, said Penthai Siriwat, illegal wildlife trade specialist at WWF Thailand. "There is a great deal of deliberation before intervening... considering the substantial costs," she told AFP. Owners like Tharnuwarht often evoke conservation to justify their pets, but Thailand's captive lions will never live in the wild. Two-year-olds Khanom and Khanun live in a DNP sanctuary after being confiscated from a cafe and private owner over improper paperwork. They could survive another decade or more, and require specialised keepers, food and care. Sanctuary chief vet Natanon Panpeth treads carefully while discussing the lion trade, warning only that the "well-being of the animals should always come first". Big cat ownership has been banned in the United States and United Arab Emirates in recent years, and Thailand's wildlife rules are soon up for review. Sadudee is hopeful some provisions may be tightened, though a ban is unlikely for now. He has his own advice for would-be owners: "Wild animals belong in the wild. There are plenty of other animals we can keep as pets." ci-sah/sco/lb
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Bloomberg
World Hunger Easing Despite Rise in Food Prices, UN Report Says
World hunger fell in 2024, as declines in Asia and South America offset an increase in the number of people who lacked adequate diets in Africa, according to a UN analysis released Monday. The share of the global population that couldn't afford enough food slipped to 8.2% in 2024 from 8.5% the year before, according to the report from the Food and Agriculture Organization. Improved food security in Southeast and South Asia and South America helped boost the global average.
