Boeing (NYSE:BA) is facing a lawsuit filed by families of passengers who died in the December crash of a Jeju Air 737-800 jet in South Korea, The New York Times reported Thursday, in the latest lawsuit over an accident that killed 179 of 181 people on board.
The plane made a belly landing at Muan International Airport after failing to deploy its landing gear, then overran the runway and crashed into an embankment; the preliminary investigation report, issued in January, identified a bird strike as the primary cause of the accident.
The lawsuit, filed in King County Superior Court in Washington state, alleges that failures in the aircraft’s “outdated” electrical and hydraulic systems prevented the pilots from landing the plane safely, and accuses Boeing (NYSE:BA) of failing to provide adequate training for the pilots; several lawsuits filed in U.S. courts this year have made similar claims.
According to the complaint, as the plane approached the airport’s runway, it suffered a bird strike that “triggered a massive failure of nearly all of its antiquated electric and hydraulic systems – designed in the 1960s – that were required to safely land the aircraft. As a direct result of these multiple failures, the pilots found themselves robbed of critical systems required to land the aircraft safely.”
The lawsuit revives concerns about Boeing’s (BA) safety practices in the wake of a series of incidents involving the company’s planes.