ALBAWABA - South Korean police raided state-run Korea Airports Corp (KAC), the Transport Ministry and a regional aviation office on Tuesday as a part of 2024 Jeju crash investigation.
The objective of the raids is to collect further evidence of professional negligence which led to the deaths of 179 people, all but two of those onboard, on Jeju Air Flight 2216 in 2024.
KAC, which operates most of South Korea’s major domestic airports, the Transport Ministry, and the Busan Regional Office of Aviation, were hit by a team of special police detectives aiming to secure any potential evidence of the aforementioned negligence.
On 29 December 2024, Jeju Air Flight 2216 was hit by a bird strike causing its right-side engine to fail. In the panic, pilots turned off the left-side engine which had minimal damage.
This, however, was not the main contributing factor in the deaths as the plane would have landed relatively unscathed if not for the instrument landing system (ILS) at the end of the runway which the plane hit – killing all passengers and four out of the six crew members.
It was found that this instrument landing system was not built according to regulations and that the ILS antenna array and its support had not been constructed in a safe zone which led the police to start investigating potential professional negligence as the cause for the major loss of life.
45 people face police suspicion in South Korea over one of the worst aviation disasters in South Korean history.
