South Korea plane crash: Jeju Air disaster at Muan International ...

A little earlier our colleagues on the news channel heard from Geoffrey Thomas, an aviation expert and commentator.

He explains: "It appears as though there has been a bird strike and one of the engines, the right-hand engine was impacted. This would have caused a lot of pressure in the cockpit."

He says that "with all the checking and cross-checking going on relating to this engine failure, it could well be that [the] pilots simply forgot to put the landing gear down".

Pilots see warnings near Muan Airport at this time of year for flocks of mallard birds, which can be very large, Thomas says.

But if the landing gear was not deployed, warnings would have sounded in the cockpit, he adds, and the undercarriage could be manually deployed if a problem prevented the landing gear from descending.

"Whether the engine situation was such that they felt they didn't have time to do that we don't know," Thomas continues. "But they would have declared an emergency and therefore the firefighting units should have been runway-side" and should have prepared for a gear-up landing. Foam can also be laid on the runway in such a case.

Thomas says that South Korea and its airlines are considered "industry best practice" - both the aircraft and the airline have an "excellent safety record".

He adds: "A lot of things about this tragedy don't make sense."