Families Demand Answers a Year After Deadliest Plane Crash in South Korea

Many details of the Jeju Air disaster that killed 179 people remain unclear despite multiple investigations by officials and protests by the victims’ families.

A year after the worst plane crash on South Korean soil killed 179 people, the families of some of the victims are still camped out in tents on the second floor of Muan International Airport, desperately seeking answers despite multiple continuing investigations.

“I wonder why we keep facing the same questions, feel the same sadness, and feel the same anger over and over again,” Kim Yu-jin, a representative of the victims’ families, said at a recent news conference in the nearby city of Gwangju. She lost both parents and her brother in the crash.

On Dec. 29, 2024, Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok skidded off the runway at Muan Airport, hit a wall and exploded. Only two onboard survived. But much is still unclear about what caused the crash.

What is known is that the plane hit a flock of birds and made an emergency turn before belly flopping onto the runway, where it smashed into the concrete berm.

Investigators from the Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board, a government agency under the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport that is leading the main inquiry into the crash, have shared little about their findings. When they have tried to give briefings, they have been blocked by the victims’ families who are seeking to restructure the main investigating body, arguing that it lacks independence from the country’s Transport Ministry.

Investigations by The New York Times have shown that officials missed warnings about the dangers posed by flocks of birds near the airport and over the risks of the concrete wall at the end of the runway.

Over the past year, the Transport Ministry has pledged to overhaul aviation safety by improving runway infrastructure at nearly half of the nation’s 15 commercial airports and to improve the safety practices of nine budget airlines.

South Korean officials have delivered on some of those promises, including the expansion of wildlife patrol staff and camera equipment to detect birds in a plane’s flight path, according to the Transport Ministry. But they have yet to fulfill other pledges, like to remove and rebuild by the end of this year the concrete berms housing navigation devices that were found on runways at seven airports.

As of Dec. 24, only the Pohang Gyeongju Airport and Gwangju Airport had completed the renovation and some airports with two berms were scheduled to finish next year, the Transport Ministry said.

Work at the Muan Airport has not begun yet, a spokeswoman at the Transport Ministry said, adding that the delicate nature of the relationship between airport officials and the victims’ families was a reason for the delay.

Relatives of the passengers killed in the crash have protested for months, demanding that a separate, independent board be hired and funded by the prime minister’s office.

The families and aviation safety experts said this could make the final report on the disaster more fair and remove the appearance of a conflict of interest with the transportation authorities who oversee aviation policy and the crash site.

Recently, South Korean officials have started to yield to some of the families’ demands.

In early December, many family members camped overnight outside the presidential office in Seoul to oppose a planned hearing by the existing investigation board to announce its interim findings. The board canceled the hearings.

Later in the month, a standing committee at the National Assembly passed a proposal to create the new investigation panel. The bill still faces a floor vote before officially passing.

“Independence is fundamental to accident investigations,” said Ms. Kim, the representative of the families. “We expect this to improve transparency in determining the cause of the accident and the effectiveness of safety recommendations to prevent similar incidents from happening again.”

Aviation experts in the United States point to the fact that the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board underwent a similar transition, becoming an independent agency through a 1974 law, years after forming as a part of the Department of Transportation.

“This is absolutely a step forward in improving safety for its citizens, and indeed the world at large,” said Christopher Freeze, an aviation expert and former N.T.S.B. air safety investigator.

The transition would leave several aspects of the investigation in limbo, though it did not mean the investigators had paused their work, said Kim Gihun, the director general of the South Korean investigation board who would most likely be dismissed if the bill were passed.

“There’s actually too much that’s uncertain right now,” Mr. Kim said.

He said the board would watch the progress of the bill in the National Assembly as members discussed whether to release an interim report about the crash by the first anniversary. The International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency that sets global aviation standards, sets that deadline on accidents for which the final report cannot be produced within a year.

If the deadline is missed, South Korea could get a lower audit rating from the I.C.A.O., Mr. Kim said, though he noted that it would not be the first time that the country had missed such a deadline.

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