Jeju Air

Is Jeju Air safe?

Jeju Air flies under a strong regulatory system and passes the same IATA safety audit as South Korea's big airlines, but its recent record is far worse than theirs. On 29 December 2024, its flight 2216 crashed at Muan and 179 of the 181 people on board died, the deadliest air accident on South Korean soil. We score it 68. Almost two years later, the official report on what went wrong is still not published.

What happened on flight 2216

The Boeing 737-800 was arriving from Bangkok and was cleared to land on runway 01 at Muan. At 08:57 local time the tower warned the crew of birds. About a minute later, both flight recorders stopped. The crew declared a mayday for a bird strike during a go-around, turned back and landed on the opposite runway, 19, with the landing gear up, about two-thirds of the way down the runway.

The aircraft slid off the end and hit a localizer antenna array mounted on a concrete mound about 2 m high and covered with earth. It broke apart and burned. Two flight attendants in the tail survived.

What the investigation has found

South Korea's Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board (ARAIB) leads the investigation, with help from the US NTSB and the French BEA. Its July 2025 finding, given to families but withheld from publication after they objected, was that the crew appeared to have shut down the less damaged left engine instead of the right engine that had taken the worst of the bird strike. The finding was given without supporting data, and the pilots' union and the families disputed it.

ARAIB had planned to publish its final report in June 2026. It has not done so. A new chair, Choi Ki-young, met families at Muan in August 2026 and promised a new expert panel and more transparency. Police have booked 67 people on suspicion of professional negligence, and in August 2026 they referred seven transport ministry officials to prosecutors for allegedly false briefings that said the localizer had been installed according to the rules.

Why the berm matters

The berm turned a survivable belly landing into a disaster. In January 2026, the transport ministry told the National Assembly that the Muan localizer "failed to comply with airport safety operation standards": structures within 240 m of the runway end must break on impact, and this one, 199 m from the end, should have been made frangible during a 2020 upgrade. A simulation commissioned by ARAIB, disclosed by a lawmaker, found that everyone on board would probably have survived without it. The government is replacing similar concrete structures at seven airports.

That is a failure of the airport and the regulator, not of Jeju Air. It is why we score South Korean oversight a little lower than Japan's.

Jeju Air's own problems

The airline's own record is not clean either. In May 2025, the transport ministry fined Jeju Air 800 million won and suspended three engineers after finding that pre- and post-flight inspections on two aircraft had run past the 48-hour limit and that an engine defect had come back because troubleshooting did not follow the manual. In January 2025, ministry data showed Jeju Air had the highest aircraft flying hours of any Korean operator, and the airline cut its schedule by 10 to 15% to free up time for maintenance.

The fleet is in transition. CAPA counted 42 aircraft averaging 11.8 years in August 2026, when Jeju Air took its 13th Boeing 737 MAX 8. The rest are 737-800s.

Should you fly Jeju Air?

The risk of any single flight is still very low. Before 2024, Jeju Air had carried passengers for almost 20 years without a fatal accident, and its regulator and audit standards are the same as Korean Air's. If you want the lowest risk on the same routes, Korean Air and Asiana have better records, though not perfect ones.

If you fly Jeju Air, the advice is the same as on any airline: listen to the briefing, count the rows to your nearest exit and leave your bags in an evacuation. On short Korean and Japanese domestic hops, keep the seat belt fastened; turbulence seriously injured a crew member on a Seoul to Jeju flight in August 2026.

How we scored it

The accident record (60) is at the bottom of the band for one fatal accident in 15 years, because 2216 killed almost everyone on board and investigators point to crew actions. Serious incidents (62) reflect the 2025 maintenance fine and very high aircraft use. Oversight (84) stays fairly high: Korea's system is strong, but its handling of Muan is not.