Introduction

Abstract

On November 28, 2006 at 4:00 pm, an airplane belonging to one of the small domestic carriers was approaching Jeju International Airport located in the largest island of the Republic of Korea. There were 69 passengers and 4 flight attendants on board. At 4:15 pm, the pilot of the airplane tried to land at the airport. At that time, the pilot recognized that there was a sudden rush of wind. Therefore, instead of a soft landing, where the main landing gear of the airplane touches down first, the pilot decided to attempt a hard landing with its nose landing gear. Unfortunately, in the course of landing, the nose landing gear broke off due to a mechanical failure. However, although the airplane skidded off the runway for a while, there were no serious injuries. As a consequence of this event, the airport was closed for about 3 h. Finally, at 7:45 pm, the airport returned to normal.

The above is the brief reconstruction of an event based on the report of an aircraft accident occurred at Jeju International Airport of the Republic of Korea (ARAIB 2006). It was a stroke of good luck that there were no serious injuries. However, what I want to emphasize from this event is that the airport restored its function within 3 h thanks to the Airplane Accident Emergency Response Manual (Article 2006). This manual was developed by the National Security Council of the Republic of Korea in 2005 to specify detailed responses with clear responsibilities regarding various kinds of emergency events that are likely to occur in an airport. Therefore, according to this manual, necessary counterplans were properly identified and then systematically carried out, such as escorting injured people to hospitals, removing the broken-down airplane from the runway, and cleaning up foreign objects (i.e., debris) from the runway, etc. Without this manual, it is evident that a huge amount of visible as well as invisible loss would have been inevitable. I think this event is a typical example illustrating why we need a procedure.