Someone signed off on it. An engineer, a regulator, a committee — someone looked at the reinforced concrete berm anchoring the localizer antenna near the end of Muan's Runway 01 and determined it met the standard. On December 29, 2024, 179 people died in the consequences of that determination.
The crash wasn't only about the gear. Jeju Air Flight 2216's belly landing — likely triggered by a bird strike disabling both hydraulic systems — was a catastrophic emergency. But runway excursion research is unambiguous: aircraft that overrun on a cleared, obstacle-free surface have dramatically higher survival rates. What transforms a survivable overrun into a mass-casualty event is a rigid structure in the deceleration path.
This is exactly what frangibility standards exist to prevent. ICAO Annex 14 requires that navigation aids installed within the Runway End Safety Area use frangible mounts — structures engineered to shear, collapse, and yield on impact, dissipating energy rather than concentrating it. A frangible localizer pole bends. A reinforced concrete berm does not.
At 150 knots, the physics are unforgiving. Kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity. A 70-tonne aircraft sliding toward a rigid obstacle has no meaningful deceleration corridor — the energy transfers instantaneously into the airframe. The Flight Safety Foundation's excursion data consistently shows that obstacles within 300 metres of a runway end convert moderate overruns into fatal ones.
Muan's berm was not a rogue installation. It reflected a compliance gap that exists at airports across the world — facilities that meet minimum ICAO RESA requirements of 90 metres without satisfying the 240-metre recommended standard, and where frangibility requirements are interpreted narrowly or enforced inconsistently.
The investigation at Muan will focus on the aircraft, the crew, the birds. It should also focus on the approval stamp on a concrete structure that had no business being there.