South Korea has ordered a maintenance audit of all Boeing 737-800 airliners operated by its airlines after another Jeju Airlines crew reported a landing gear issue. The flight returned to Seoul after taking off due to an unspecified problem with the gear. The problem occurred a day after a Jeju 737-800 landed gear up at Muan International Airport and hit a berm holding an ILS antenna on the infield. Two crew members survived but the other 179 occupants died. There are 101 737-800s on the South Korean registry, distributed among six carriers.
It’s still very early, but the best guesses right now all point to pilot error since it’s hard to picture a situation where a bird strike leads to a lack of landing gear and secondary control surfaces. What’s interesting is the airline and SK immediately and very publicly emphasizing that they’re inspecting and auditing all of their Boeing 737-800s. In the comments of news articles and posts about this the predictable is observable; people are dogpiling Boeing. Seems to me these public announcements may be a brilliant way of getting the public’s eyes pointed at Boeing again and not at the strong possibility that two pilots were poorly trained enough to turn a partial engine failure into a fatal gear up, no flaps, no spoilers landing that combined very poorly with a mind-numbing airport design that features a large berm 450’ from the end of the runway and no efforts such as EMAS to try and mitigate that major risk. The other end of the runway has no berm but there is still a block wall 500’ from the end of the runway.
Depends on crew interpretation of effect of bird strike, certainly have to handle well in a hurry but if both engines are giving signs of malfunctioning …
It is generally believed that the forward fuselage will limit bird strikes to engine(s) on one side, but some experienced aviation people have challenged that. Certainly if birds spread across ground fly up when the see a huge bird coming they’ll get hit by both wings, I presume both ways depending on their position at taking flight, and possibly smear windshields.
FDR should give good clues as to engines, CVR may reveal crew’s thinking.
Including ensuring shut down the engine that is troubled not the good one.
(In this case no time to diagnose, by the time engine would be shut down the airplane would be on the ground.)