Jeju Air Flight 2216

Jeju Air Flight 2216 was a scheduled international passenger flight operated by Jeju Air from Suvarnabhumi Airport near Bangkok, Thailand, to Muan International Airport in Muan County, South Korea. On 29 December 2024, when the Boeing 737-800 operating the flight was approaching Muan, a bird strike occurred, with both of the engines ingesting birds, causing an apparent loss of thrust in the right engine. The pilots issued a mayday alert, performed a go-around, and on the second landing attempt, the landing gear did not deploy and the airplane belly-landed well beyond the normal touchdown zone. It overran the runway at high speed, collided with the approach lighting system, and crashed into a berm encasing a concrete structure that supported an antenna array for the instrument landing system (ILS). The collision killed all 175 passengers and 4 of the 6 crew members. The surviving two cabin crew were seated in the rear of the plane, which detached from the fuselage, and were rescued with injuries.

Both the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) stopped functioning a few seconds before the mayday call, and evidence of a bird strike with a species of migratory duck was later found in both engines, with the right engine having sustained severe bird damage. In July 2025, South Korean media reported that the investigation board found that the crew mistakenly turned off the relatively unscathed left engine rather than the badly damaged right engine. In January 2026, it was revealed that researchers had concluded that the passengers would have survived if the ILS antenna array and its support had been constructed in accordance with international safety guidelines.

The crash was the deadliest aviation disaster involving a South Korean airliner since the 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801 in Guam and also the deadliest in South Korea, surpassing the 2002 crash of Air China Flight 129 that killed 129 people. This was also the first fatal accident in Jeju Air's 19-year history and was the deadliest aviation accident since the 2018 crash of Lion Air Flight 610, before being surpassed by Air India Flight 171, which crashed in June 2025.

Background

Aircraft

The aircraft involved, manufactured in 2009, was a 15-year-old Boeing 737-8AS registered as HL8088 and was equipped with two CFM International CFM56-7B26 engines. It was acquired by Jeju Air in 2017 after previously operating for Ryanair. Less than a month before the crash, Jeju Air had resumed regular international services at Muan International Airport following a suspension caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the airline was operating four flights a week between Muan and Bangkok, a service that Jeju Air began on 8 December.

In the 48 hours leading to the crash, the aircraft completed 13 flights that included stops in Muan, Jeju Island, and Incheon, as well as to Beijing, Bangkok, Kota Kinabalu, Nagasaki, and Taipei. No issues were found in the aircraft's safety pre-check before its final flight, according to Jeju Air.

Jeju Air initially said that the crashed aircraft had not been involved in any prior incidents, but data from the Korea Airports Corporation showed that in February 2021, the aircraft was damaged when its tail struck the runway during takeoff from Gimpo International Airport in Seoul, causing structural damage to the plane, for which Jeju Air was fined 2.2 billion won ($1.5 million) by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport for violating safety regulations. Amid criticism over the airline's omission of the incident, Jeju Air said "the incident from three years ago was minor and therefore classified as an 'event' rather than an 'accident' under aviation law, which is why it was not considered part of the aircraft's accident history."

Passengers and crew

Of the 175 passengers, two were Thai nationals, and the other 173 were South Korean. The oldest on board was born in 1946, and the youngest in 2021. Nine members of the same family that included the three-year-old child were also on board. Of the 181 people on board, 82 were male and 93 were female. There were five passengers under the age of 10. The captain had been an employee of Jeju Air since 2019 and had accumulated over 6,820 hours of flight experience, including 6,096 hours on the Boeing 737; the first officer had over 1,650 hours with 1,339 of them on the Boeing 737. The crew also included four flight attendants.

Most passengers were returning home from a five-day Christmas package tour to Bangkok. Thirteen passengers were reported to be active or former government officials on a provincial or local/municipal level, eight were current or former civil servants from Hwasun County, and five were administrative officers of the Jeonnam Provincial Office of Education. 81 passengers were residents of Gwangju, while 76 others, including one Thai national, resided in South Jeolla Province. The remaining passengers originated from North Jeolla Province, Gyeonggi Province, Seoul, Jeju Island, South Gyeongsang Province and South Chungcheong Province.

Accident

On 29 December, the aircraft took off from Suvarnabhumi Airport at 2:28 a.m ICT (UTC+7). Kerati Kijmanawat, the director of Airports of Thailand, stated that no abnormalities regarding the aircraft nor the runway had been reported.

At 8:54 a.m. KST (UTC+9), the plane was authorized to land at Muan International Airport on runway 01. As the plane was preparing to land, it was warned at 8:57 a.m. about the potential for a bird strike. At 8:58:56 a.m., the pilots broadcast a mayday alert and advised they were going around. This was followed by a request at 9:00 a.m. to land in the opposite runway, runway 19, after the landing gear was not deployed. This request was authorized at 9:01 a.m.

The crash occurred at 9:03 a.m. as the aircraft belly landed, touching down 1,200 meters (3,900 ft) along the runway. It overshot, with video footage showing the aircraft sliding down the runway on the engine nacelles with a sustained nose-high attitude. It continued 250 meters (820 ft) past the runway threshold and exploded after colliding with the berm supporting the instrument landing system localizer. Both engines were embedded into the berm structure while the tail assembly continued forward, rolling over and resting inverted. Wreckage from the forward fuselage was found 20 to 300 m (66 to 984 ft) past the berm, and partially damaged the perimeter wall.

Local residents said they saw flames and sparks originating from the aircraft's right wing and heard explosions and "metal scraping" before impact. Some reported seeing a flock of birds being ingested into the right engine, causing a fire. The only survivors were two crew members rescued from the tail section of the aircraft. A local restaurant owner heard "loud bangs" that sounded like the backfiring of a motorcycle engine, leading him to rush to the restaurant rooftop and record a 54-second video on his cell phone of the aircraft's descent and crash which subsequently went viral.

Emergency services received multiple calls around 9:03 a.m., and the fire response issued a level-3 emergency, its highest alert. According to the National Fire Agency and the Ministry of National Defense, 1,562 personnel, including 490 firefighters, 500 military personnel and 455 police officers, were dispatched. One of the survivors was rescued at 9:23 a.m., and the other was rescued from the tail section at 9:50 a.m. The fire was extinguished within 43 minutes of the crash, and the flight recorders were retrieved within the day. The flight data recorder (FDR) was found partially damaged without a connector linking its data storage unit to the power supply, while the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was intact.

The two flight attendants seated in the aft jump seats were the only survivors of the crash and remained conscious during the crash. Hydraulic equipment was used to rescue one of the survivors, who had been pinned down by a fallen cabinet. They both sustained moderate to serious wounds, one with fractures to his ribs, shoulder blade and upper spine, and the other with injuries to her ankle and head. Both received medical treatment at separate hospitals in Mokpo before being transferred to a hospital in Seoul. Both survivors appeared to be disoriented and were unable to remember what had happened immediately following the landing.

By 1:36 p.m., the firefighters had switched to search operations to recover bodies. A temporary morgue was set up in an airport hangar to handle the bodies recovered from the wreckage, and a waiting room was created for family members of the occupants at the airport with civil servants assigned to each family for support while they awaited news from the crash. Tents were also erected inside the airport to temporarily house arriving family members. Later at night, the family members were temporarily accommodated at the dormitories of Mokpo National University.

Regular operations of Muan International Airport were suspended. At the time of the crash, ongoing construction work had shortened the runway's length from 2,800 to 2,500 meters (9,200 to 8,200 ft); officials from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport dismissed the possibility of the relatively short runway length having contributed to the accident. The airport's sole runway is expected to remain closed to commercial traffic until 1 January 2026. Emergency and training flights resumed at the airport on 24 February 2025.