A crumpled portion of the Boeing 737 operational manual discovered at the Jeju Air crash site / Captured from YouTube channel MBN News

Portions of a Boeing 737 operational manual were discovered crumpled and seemingly torn in haste at the site of the Jeju Air crash. Experts believe the pages indicate efforts by the pilots to perform a belly landing.

According to MBN, a cable TV, Thursday, several pages of the Boeing 737's operational manual, detailing various technical metrics for the aircraft, were found among the wreckage.

The manual, also known as the Quick Reference Handbook (QRH), is a 2,000-page guide containing emergency response procedures. It is typically kept in the cockpit, with one copy each for the captain and co-pilot.

The recovered pages included details on the minimum power required for the Boeing 737-800 to glide with its landing gear deployed, as well as procedures for an emergency water landing.

Experts suggested that the torn pages indicate the pilots' desperate efforts to manage the emergency. Koh Seung-hee, an aviation operations professor at Silla University, said, "The captain might have instructed the co-pilot to check how far they could glide or what actions were possible, prompting them to refer to the manual."

A section of the Quick Reference Handbook (QRH) found at the crash site / Captured from YouTube channel MBN News

Another professor from Silla University, Kim Kwang-il, said, "In such urgent situations, they couldn't open the entire manual, so they likely tore out only the necessary pages to make decisions quickly."

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport has begun analyzing the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) to determine the cause of the crash, having converted its audio files for review.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.