The black boxes of the passenger plane that crashed in South Korea Last month, 179 people stopped recording about four minutes before the crash, South Korean officials said Saturday.
After analyzing the devices, the Concluded the US National Transportation Safety Board That both flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped working about four minutes before the crash, South Korea’s transport ministry said.
The Boeing 737-800 The Jeju Air-operated plane skidded off a runway in the South Korean city of Muan on December 29 after its landing gear failed to deploy, crashed into a concrete structure and burst into flames, killing all but two of the 181 people on board.
Ahn Young-joon / AP
South Korean officials also sent the black boxes to the NTSB for further investigation after discovering that some data was missing.
The Department for Transport said it was not immediately clear why the devices failed to record data in the past four minutes.
“Data from the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) and FDR (flight data recorder) is crucial in accident investigations, but such investigations are conducted through research and analysis of various sources of information, and we intend to do our utmost to to determine the cause of the accident,” the ministry said in a statement.
South Korean investigators have said air traffic controllers warned the pilot of possible bird strikes two minutes before the plane issued a distress signal confirming a bird strike had occurred, after which the pilot attempted an emergency landing.
Following the crash, authorities immediately ordered an inspection of all 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines – dozens of planes in all – after the crash.
South Korean officials have also pledged to improve security at the airport after experts linked the high death toll to the locator system at Muan Airport, the structure struck by the plane when it crashed. The localizer, a set of antennas designed to guide aircraft during landings, was housed in a concrete structure covered in dirt on a raised embankment. This has raised questions about whether the structure should have been built with lighter materials that would break more easily in an impact.
