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The cause of the crash probably won’t be determined for months, with investigators expected to focus on a wide range of issues.
- Dec. 29, 2024, 4:07 p.m. ET
The footage shows a jet barreling down a runway in South Korea at high speed before it hits a barrier and catches fire, killing 179 of the 181 people aboard. To experts in crash investigations, the video raises more questions than it answers.
Why hadn’t the landing gear deployed? Were any systems malfunctioning?
The cause of the crash probably won’t be determined for months, following a rigorous investigation. And experts said investigators are expected to focus on a wide range of issues, including what the pilots were doing and saying, why the processes and mechanisms typical of an airplane landing failed, the weather conditions and whether the airplane had received proper maintenance by the airline.
“This one is very much an open-book mystery at this point,” said Shawn Pruchnicki, an aviation safety expert and professor at Ohio State University.
Plane crash experts warned against drawing conclusions about the cause until further review of the evidence. The information circulated in the days after such incidents is often scant or even incorrect, they said. Theories developed early on are often later disproved. And crashes typically have multiple causes, some of which may not be immediately apparent.
“The aviation industry is built on redundancy and there are very few single-point failures in airplane design or airplane operations,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. “Typically, it’s a combination of factors.”
Officials in South Korea said they had recovered the plane’s black boxes, which contain troves of data and recordings that will be vital to understanding what went wrong. That and other evidence from the wreckage should shed more light on what the pilots were doing and saying leading up to the crash and whether any systems were malfunctioning, experts said.
