Plane crashes are rare, but when they happen, they cause a commotion inside a community. Causes range from mechanical issues to user error, but the consequences are always drastic. Over the past three months, many airlines, including Air Canada, JetBlue, Japan Airlines, and Jeju Air, have experienced some sort of malfunction, resulting in major and minor injuries to passengers.
Jeju Air flight 7C 2216 departing from Bangkok was carrying almost 200 people, passengers, and crew, was above ground for less than two hours before, “Air traffic control authorized the plane to land at Muan International Airport at about 08:54 (23:54 GMT) – just three minutes before issuing a warning about bird activity in the area,” BBC News said.
The pilot prompted an emergency landing after experiencing major turbulence from a flock of birds in the sky. Experts told CNN reporters that the landing equipment was not fully deployed prior to the plane’s landing. The actual cause of the crash is still not fully understood. With almost no survivors, this is one of South Korea’s largest plane crashes.
WCVB Channel 5 Boston said JetBlue has also experienced many, less major, malfunctions recently. Reporters said the emergency door opened during the flight due to a passenger triggering the emergency system.
On Jan. 7, it was announced that two men had been found dead inside the landing gear of a JetBlue flight in Florida, the flight departing from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. They were found during a routine checkup after the plane had landed.
“The landing gear compartment of a plane is a dangerous place, exposing stowaways to extremely cold temperatures and a lack of oxygen. Those inside the compartment can also be crushed by landing gear when it is withdrawn back into the airplane,” BBC News said.
Although it is very difficult to get into the wheels and landing compartment, this is not the only time it has happened recently.
“The incident comes just two weeks after a body was found in the landing gear compartment of a United Airlines plane,” BBC News said, “which landed in Hawaii on Christmas Eve.”
With all of this going on, some NVD students say this makes them nervous to fly because of all the issues circulating around planes and airlines.
“This kind of makes me scared to get on a plane. What if this keeps happening? It’s really scary,” sophomore Allie Arevfiev said.
