South Korea’s worst aviation disaster in decades also was the year’s deadliest plane crash worldwide, and time is running out on 2024. A Boeing 737-800 plane operated by South Korean budget airline Jeju Air came down with its front landing gear closed and struck a concrete fence on Sunday (Dec 29) at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea, killing 179 people.
The deadliest accident in aviation history occurred in 1977, when two Boeing 747 jumbo jets collided on a foggy runway on the Spanish island of Tenerife, killing 583 of the 644 people on board the planes. Spanish investigators blamed the captain of the KLM 747 for taking off without clearance from air traffic controllers.
In an act of terrorism, nearly 3,000 people died when Al-Qaeda hijackers crashed four jetliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington, DC, and a field in southwest Pennsylvania on Sep 11, 2001.
These are some of the significant aviation accidents that happened in 2024:
Jan 2: A large passenger plane and a Japanese coast guard aircraft collided on a Tokyo runway. All five people in the coast guard plane died, but all 379 on the Japan Airlines escaped before the jet became engulfed in flames.
