Daily Kor for Sunday, June 19, 2011: The Asiana plane incident revisited

I think I wrote up yesterday's Marines-shooting-at-Asiana-plane story a bit too early. It was only in Yonhap yesterday, but now it's being picked up by AP, UPI, Reuters, CNN. The Korean media (Korea Times, Korea Herald) For your edification, I'm including the CNN story — complete with footage after footage of various Asiana planes landing and taking off — that goes along with it.

As I've taken off from Incheon International Airport various times and looked out over the Google Earth landscape below, I've thought to myself how dangerously close we seem to be to the Northern Limit Line, the de facto border that North Korea has recently begun to dispute. I'm not expert on military matters, but it almost seems as if the remarkable thing is not that this incident occurred, but that it hasn't before.

Certainly there are a lot of questions that need to be asked. Was the Asiana flight where it was supposed to be? Is Kyodong-do Island a no-flight zone for civilian aircraft or at least an area that comes with stepped-up restrictions and regulations such that those Marines would reasonably expect that if a plane weren't a ROK military plane then it shouldn't be above them? Was there a North Korean plane actually mimicking a civilian airliner's flight path in hopes of sparking an incident?

1. Visiting Greenpeace members urge South Korea to shut down Kori-1, the oldest nuclear reactor in the ROK and based on a design similar to that of Fukushima (AFP)
2. ROK Prime Minister Kim Hwangsik says corruption is widespread in South Korea, and ending irregularities in bureaucracy, essential for the country to become an advanced nation, is a top priority (Yonhap)
3. In weekly Republican address, US Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota says ratifying FTA with South Korea will jumpstart the US economy (LAT, UPI, CNN, Bloomberg)
4. Hana Financial Group says it remains committed to talks aimed at acquiring Korea Exchange Bank from Lone Star Funds, in a deal currently worth US$4.3 billion (Bloomberg)
5. Prime Minister's Office inspectors confirm Ministry of Land, Transport, and Maritime Affairs officials were bribed and treated to local "entertainment," possibly including sexual services in room salons (Joongang Daily)
6. South Korean business delegation in talks with Guinean authorities about investing in the West African country's natural resources, including iron, uranium, and aluminum (Bloomberg)
7. Diligent drug-free Korean defeats pothead American South Korea's Park Taehwan edges out US Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps in 100m freestyle and 400m event at Santa Clara Grand Prix (AFP, Yonhap, Korea Times, Korea Herald)
8. Pathway in Shinan County wins award for Most Creative Bridge (Yonhap)

Are Korea's domestic airliners vulnerable to "short-haul fatigue"?

I don't know how well publicized the news has been about the Southwest Airlines jet that ended up with a hole in it due to metal fatigue, but it has a lot of people in the US freaked out.

We've been hearing a lot about speculation that the nature of short-haul flights — far more frequent "cycles" of take-off and landing with the concomitant pressurizing and depressurizing than with long-haul flights having the same "mileage" — may have heavily contributed to the "rupture" and that makes people worried:

Southwest Airlines' older aircraft plus its famously efficient short-haul operations — requiring planes to fly an average of six times a day — probably contributed to the fuselage rupture that forced a jetliner carrying 118 passengers to make an emergency landing in Arizona last week.

Aviation experts said the aluminum skin of the 15-year-old Boeing 737-300 could have become fatigued from the stress of daily landings and takeoffs as well as frequent changes in cabin pressure.

Six flights a day? Does that not sound like a Seoul-to-Cheju milk runner? The first thing that occurred to me was that that situation — frequent short-haul flights covering a distance of hundreds, not thousands, of kilometers — perfectly characterized the domestic operations of South Korea's local carriers, Asiana, Korean Air, and a handful of discount start-ups. Ditto with domestic carriers in next-door Japan (as well as operators between most Korean and Japanese destinations).

Sure enough, there are others who thought the exact same thing:

South Korea's government also ordered Asiana Airlines and its affiliated budget carrier, Air Busan, to conduct safety inspections of their Boeing 737 fleets, reports the Korea Times.

Neither operates Boeing 737-300s. But Asiana has two Boeing 737-400 planes, and Air Busan has three Boeing 737-400s and 737-500s.

"Our two 737-400 aircraft are only 14 years-old. Given the fact that commercial airplanes normally retire after 30 years in operation, our planes are fairly new. We have been making all-out efforts to keep our planes in good shape," an Asiana Airlines spokesman told the newspaper.

That's good to know, but it rattles the public that this kind of thing is being discovered and diligently addressed only after a serious incident occurred. If I'd been on a short-haul flight from, say, Seoul to Fukuoka and I suddenly got an instant skylight above my seat, I might be booking passage on seagoing vessels for the rest of my natural days.

The real reason airlines want you to turn off your electronics
before flight is that you might snap embarrassing pictures
of their planes falling apart before your very eyes.