The flight data and cockpit voice recorder of Jeju Air, which crashed in South Korea in December and killed 179 people, stopped recording about four minutes before the plane hit a concrete structure at Muan Airport, the Ministry of Transportation announced. did.
Authorities investigating the disaster, the worst plane crash on mainland South Korea, will analyze the cause of the black box's cessation of recording, the ministry said.
The voice recorder was initially analyzed in South Korea and was found to be missing data, so it was sent to a National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said.
The damaged flight data recorder was brought to the United States for analysis in cooperation with American safety regulators, the ministry said.
Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 departed from Thailand's capital Bangkok and headed for Muan in southwestern South Korea, making a belly landing, overshooting the runway at a local airport, colliding with an embankment, and bursting into flames.
The pilots told air traffic control that the plane had received a bird strike and declared an emergency about four minutes before the crash. Two injured crew members sitting in the tail were rescued.
Former Ministry of Transport accident investigator Sim Jaedong said the discovery of missing data in the critical final minutes was surprising and suggested that all power, including backup, may have been cut off. , said this is a rare occurrence.
The Department of Transport said other data is also available and will be used in the investigation, and that information will be shared with the victims' families to ensure transparency.
Some of the victims' families argued that the ministry should not lead the investigation, but instead should involve independent experts, including experts recommended by the families.
The investigation into the crash is also focusing on the embankment, which was designed to support the “localizer” system used to help aircraft land, and why it was constructed with such a hard material and yet at the end of the crash. Questions have arisen as to whether it was built nearby. Runway.
