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Comment by thekevan | Hacker News Reader

"... the significance of the concrete wall's location about 250m (820ft) off the end of the runway."

"...the runway design "absolutely (did) not" meet industry best practices, which preclude any hard structure within at least 300m (984ft) of the end of the runway."

"it emerged that remarks in Muan International Airport's operating manual, uploaded early in 2024, said the concrete embankment was too close to the end of the runway."

I mean that was a pretty obvious design flaw that went against common standards. I agree it isn't cut and dry yet but an investigation isn't going to change the above info.

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So it would appear that this structure would be fully compliant if placed 50m further. That's less than a second's difference. The plane would crash into it at the same speed, just a tiny bit later.

OP is 100% right that many, many things must have gone wrong for the position of this structure to remotely matter (human or mechanical errors).

I don’t disagree with that. It is a compounding issue but I am much more interested in what happened up to that point. Many many small things or one big thing went wrong for it to even get to that point.

But don't forget, that point you mention is the point where the people were killed.

There is a whole chain of causality. They were killed by multiple successive problems compounding.

See Swiss cheese model.

I'm really not sure the chain of bird strike, belly landing, mid runway landing and fiery explosion are equal parts of that chain. One seems to weigh heavier than the rest.

There's a few more you're missing there which is the point of the investigation.

Absolutely correct! Had the bird strike not occurred, there wouldn’t have been a crash. Had things with the go around been handled properly, there would have been no crash.

Etc etc. The fact that a wall was 50m out of compliance or whatever it ends up being will be a footnote at best in the review of this crash.

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