I was wondering the same thing and suspected it was some safety feature (better for a plane to smack into said wall instead of crash into some populated area, etc) I had no idea he had to make the approach in the opposite direction.
Stinks of bad crew resource management and ATC which is why the ATC and airline for raided by SK officials.
People often have an idea that ATC actually controls what happens. They just give advisory guidance to pilots, who ultimately decide what to do. A clearance to land or the lack of one does not absolve the pilots from making their own judgments and decisions about how to conduct the navigation of the aircraft, and where and when to land.
Usually, it’s a bad idea to not follow ATC guidance, but in the case of emergencies especially, pilots call the shots.
But the tower at an airport, their job is to supply information, and once you call mayday you’re in total control - you can ask them to do whatever you think will help you save the flight, including (and usually automatically done) diverting all other flights, clearing all runways, and cancelling any departures pending until the issue is resolved.
Pilots have to be trained to ignore ATC as necessary, because planes have crashed because of trying to be polite to requests (and not declaring mayday or pan pan).
If there were significant winds it would have compounded those factors.
It is curious that the gear was retracted. I can only think that this was due to some kind of system failure? Perhaps that same failure explains the decision to double back instead of going around?
Lots of questions, hopefully there will be answers.
Still, the structure does not seem to meet the standard for frangibility that is indicated for objects in the approach path within 300m, although it’s not like it was at the very end of the runway.
Runway over/undershoots are actually quite common, and the building of a nonfrangible structure on an otherwise safe skid zone is a significant error in design principles that is not common or conformal to industry standards.
If those antennas had been placed on property designed towers instead of a concrete bunker, the passengers and crew very well may have walked away without a scratch, despite any errors on the part of the crew or procedures of the airline.
That's why EASA says put the plane down if there’s a strike on approach. Ryanair 4102 is a good example of a close one there as a reference.
ETA: The primary footage is hard to find now that the topic is so saturated, but there is a specific clip from a close vantage where it is highly visible. I'll include a link if I can find it.
Landing gear has a manual gravity release by the first officer that doesn't require the hydraulics. (But does take some time.)
Ground effect was certainly involved (why they glided so far before touching down) but the bigger factor was their high speed, lack of flaps, and lack of gear.
You have to reach all the way back to do it, difficult to do with all the other shit going on.
"TransAsia Pilot Shut Off Wrong Engine Moments Before Crash" (2015)
Taiwan aviation officials on Tuesday released a detailed report of how the pilot mistakenly shut off the plane's only working engine after the other lost power. "Wow, pulled back the wrong side throttle," the captain said shortly before crashing.
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonwells/transasia-pi...>
I seem to recall a Mentour Pilot episode (YouTube channel) describing either that or a similar incident.
Point being that when things start going very wrong you've got to actively think to prevent making them worse.
That said, I have seen some absolutely horrendous responses to emergencies go from kinda bad to massive destruction of property, so much so that unless one has trained for the specific emergency, the best course of action is to assess way more than you think you need. And we often have more time than we think, and we make the the right decisions, they are the right decisions because they give us more time.
> no idea he had to make the approach in the opposite direction.
So the wall is actually at the beginning of the runway. That wall was never never meant to be at the end of a landing but at the start of landing.
I don't understand why this isn't made clear. Basically the runway was used against the design specifications.
There are airports in which approaches always or very nearly always follow the same profiles given local conditions. SFO, SJC, and SAN would be three examples off the top of my head.
SFO's major approaches are over the bay, opposite approaches would involve rapid descents dictated by mountains near the airport.
SJO and SAN are both limited by proximate downtowns with tall towers. Nominal approach glide paths cut below the rooflines of several structures, and make for some interesting experiences for arriving travellers.
What’s noteworthy, there’s a note to use extreme caution due to this wall if landing or taking off towards it.
it seems this is the same structure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Air_Flight_2216#Non-stand...
3800 - 2800 = 1km.
Did the plane skid for 1km before crashing into the obstacle?
https://web.archive.org/web/20241215000000*/https://aim.koca...
Are we expected to believe these pages never got crawled before?
Can we learn a forensic lesson for this and automatically snapshot similar pages for all runways worldwide?
You always want to land with a headwind and never a tailwind, so ATC will use whichever end is favorable for the current conditions.
In this case, if they attempted to land with a tailwind then the on-heading vector component of wind velocity must be added to the airspeed to get the ground speed... whilst this was a contributing factor to the accident, it's not something to focus on.
There will be a thorough investigation but it will take some time to get answers.
It should perhaps be pointed in news coverage since I equated "opposite direction" with "wrong direction" - hence my scepticisms about the wall.
If that's right then OP would be correct in saying, this direction wasn't meant to be used.
Sure, but so is a highway, or a river. Doesn't mean those should be built to runway standards.
Part of preflight is investigating those so you know what are options at what are not - entirely closed runways will be indicated if they’re actually broken up or just marked closed.
Do you mean at Muan?
We don’t know why the pilot elected to double back instead of go around. There may have been indications of a progressive failure that indicated that course of action, but it does seem hasty. That haste may have caused them to not be able to set up a stabilized, minimum speed approach, and may have contributed to the long touchdown, which certainly was a contributing factor.
Still, a 14 ft high concrete structure within 300M of a runway end is unusual, and does not fit the standard for frangable structures which is the guidance for runway aligned equipment.
Airports like this are designed to have two approach directions -- in this case, 10 and 190 degrees. Either approach direction would have been acceptable depending on the prevailing wind.