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). All 175 passengers and 4 of the 6 crew members aboard died in the crash. 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.
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.
Passengers and crew
Of the 175 passengers, 2 were Thai nationals, and the other 173 were South Korean. The oldest on board was born in 1946, and the youngest, a three-year-old child, in 2021. The family that included the three-year-old child had 9 members on board. Of the 181 people on board, 82 were male and 93 were female. There were 5 passengers under the age of ten. 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 4 flight attendants.
Most passengers were returning home from a five-day Christmas package tour to Bangkok. Of the 175 passengers, 13 were reported to be active or former government officials on a provincial or local/municipal level, 8 were current or former civil servants from Hwasun County, and 5 were administrative officers of the Jeonnam Provincial Office of Education. 81 passengers were residents of Gwangju, while 76 others, including 1 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 (70 to 1,000 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 remained closed to commercial traffic until 1 January 2026. Emergency and training flights resumed at the airport on 24 February 2025.
Victims
A total of 179 people were confirmed dead, including 4 of the 6 crew members and all 175 passengers. Local fire officials said that passengers were ejected from the aircraft after it hit a barrier at the end of the runway, leaving little chance of survival. Firefighters said some bodies were scattered 100 to 200 m (300 to 700 ft) from the crash site while others were found mutilated or burnt among the wreckage. Police officials predicted it would require over a week to identify the human remains recovered. Some family members provided officials with DNA samples at the airport to help identify the dead. Three hours after the crash, South Jeolla Province Governor Kim Yung-rok said 120 bodies had been identified; 39 additional bodies had had their fingerprints collected, and the remaining 20 would be identified using DNA samples. By 31 December, all but 5 of the dead had been identified, including 32 via DNA comparison. All 179 victims had been identified by 1 January 2025, and search operations formally ended on 5 January.
Investigation
The crash is currently being investigated by the South Korean Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board (ARAIB), with assistance from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Boeing. Eight investigators arrived at the crash site on 31 December. GE Aerospace, which co-manufactured the engines on the plane in its CFM International joint venture, joined the investigation.
At a press conference on the day of the accident, Muan County fire chief Lee Jeong-hyun said that the cause of the landing gear failure was presumed to have been adverse weather combined with a bird strike; the weather around the airport at the time of the crash was favorable with almost no wind, rain or clouds, and visibility was 9 kilometers (5.6 mi).
Both flight recorders, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR), were recovered and taken to Gimpo International Airport for analysis. On 11 January, the ARAIB stated that both the CVR and FDR had stopped recording four minutes before the aircraft crashed. Investigators say the cutoff may have resulted from loss of all electrical power, including backup.
By 1 January 2025, initial CVR data had been extracted and the CVR transcript was created on 4 January. The damaged flight data recorder was sent to Washington, DC, United States, for analysis on 6 January. A preliminary report was released on 27 January.
On 7 January, the director of the ARAIB resigned. The Transport Ministry's head of aviation policy was removed from the board's investigation and all of its activities.
On 8 January, the South Korean National Assembly passed a motion to set up a parliamentary committee, with two subcommittees (investigation and prevention, and families support and memorial projects) placed under the panel.
Bird strike
Six minutes before the crash and one minute before the flight data and voice recorders stopped recording, the airport traffic control issued a warning of nearby birds, a hazard to the aircraft. Shortly afterwards, the pilots acknowledged the presence of a flock of birds flying below the aircraft. Both flight recorders stopped operating at 8:58:50 a.m. At 8:58:56 a.m., the pilot declared a mayday. Authorities said that a bird strike may have caused a malfunction that affected the hydraulic system controlling the landing gear and that there was insufficient time for the pilots to manually deploy the landing gear. On 7 January 2025, the ARAIB confirmed that Flight 2216 had experienced a bird strike after feathers were found on one of its engines. Muan International Airport has the highest rate of bird strikes of the 14 regional airports in South Korea, with a strike rate of 0.09%. Prior to the crash, ten cases of bird strikes had been recorded at Muan since 2019. Although the absolute number of strikes is small in statistical terms, the strike rate of 0.09% of flights is significantly higher than other major airports like Gimpo (0.018%) and Jeju (0.013%). The airport was constructed near major bird habitats and feeding grounds, such as the Yeongsan lake and the mudflats of the southwest coast. The development of the nearby land had caused local birds to take increasingly erratic routes, and climate change has led to many species of migratory birds becoming resident birds. The Chosun Ilbo reported that environmental impact assessments had recommended the deployment of sound cannons, lasers, and warning lights at the airport, but their implementation was delayed due to runway extension work.
The assessments also expressed concern over plans to expand the length of the airport runway from 2,800 to 3,160 meters (9,190 to 10,370 ft) by 2025, and that three bird habitats existed adjacent to the airport, with a bird population of up to 1,760. Official regulations require that a single runway operated for nine hours or less requires a minimum of four personnel to drive away birds, but it was found that only one person was on duty on the day of the disaster. The Korea Times, citing an investigation headquarters official, reported that the investigation will also examine the impact of the shortened runway length (from 2,800 to 2,500 meters).