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.
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