As the investigation begins into the deadliest plane crash on South Korean soil, experts have raised doubts about whether a suspected collision with a bird could have caused such damage.

All but two of the 181 people aboard Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 died Sunday morning after the plane made an unsuccessful emergency landing at South Korea’s Maun International Airport. It had flown in from the Thai capital Bangkok and had dozens of Christmas vacationers on board.

The passengers included five children under the age of ten, including a three-year-old.

Horrifying footage showed the plane skidding down the runway before colliding with a brick wall and bursting into flames. The only two survivors were two crew members who had been sitting in the back of the plane.

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The incident resulted in the highest death toll from a plane crash on South Korean soil in the country’s history. Otherwise, the country is known to have had a strong aviation safety record over the past two decades.

“Why didn’t fire engines put foam on the runway? Why weren’t they present when the plane landed? And why did the plane land so far down the runway? “And why was there a brick wall at the end of the runway?” said Airline News editor Geoffrey Thomas.

South Korean officials said they were investigating the cause of the crash, including a possible bird strike, as it emerged that air traffic controllers had warned pilots of the risk of a collision just three minutes before the plane hit the runway. One minute after the warning, the pilots made an emergency call.

According to local media, a passenger on the flight sent a text message to a family member saying a bird was “stuck in the wing” and the plane was unable to land. “Shall I leave my last words?” the passenger then wrote.

Under global aviation regulations, South Korea will conduct a civil investigation into the crash and automatically involve the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States, where the plane was designed and built. Jeju Air claimed the crash was not due to “any maintenance issues.”

According to South Korea’s transport ministry, the flight data recorder was found at 11:30 a.m. local time (2:30 a.m. GMT), about two and a half hours after the crash, and the cockpit voice recorder was found at 2:24 p.m.

Investigators later told South Korea this Yonhap However, the news agency said the voice recorder was damaged, meaning decoding could take up to a month.

Mr Thomas described the flight data recorder as the “heartbeat of the aircraft” which would provide clues to the course of the crash. There are likely several reasons for the crash.

However, experts considered it unlikely that a bird strike was the sole cause of the landing gear malfunction.

“A bird strike is not uncommon, and problems with a landing gear are not uncommon. “Bird strikes are far more common, but they typically do not alone result in the loss of an aircraft,” Thomas said.

Australian aviation safety expert Geoffrey Dell said: “I have never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from extending.”

A bird strike could have affected CFM International’s engines if a flock of birds had been sucked into them, but that would not have shut them down immediately, giving the pilots some time to deal with the situation, Dell said.

The experts also questioned why the pilots did not have the time to brake as usual during an emergency belly landing.

Typically, a belly landing results in “you landing on your engines and having a bumpy ride,” Thomas said.

“You arrive with minimal fuel, you have fire engines on duty, you cover the runway with foam and you land at the very end of the runway, and usually the situation ends up being OK.”

Joo Jong-wan, deputy transport minister, dismissed concerns about using a brick wall as a safety measure, saying both ends of the runway had “safety zones with green buffer areas before reaching the outer wall.”

He added that the airport was “designed in accordance with standard aviation safety guidelines, even if the wall appears to be closer than it actually is.”

The captain had been working in this rank since 2019 and had completed 6,823 flight hours, the Ministry of Transport said. The first officer had been working in this rank since 2023 and had completed around 1,650 flight hours.

The Boeing model involved in the crash, a 737-800, is one of the world’s most widely flown airliners with a generally good safety record and was developed long before the MAX variant, which was recently embroiled in a Boeing safety crisis.