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.

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 m 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 m 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 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 2800 to 2500 m; 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.