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The black boxes of Passenger plane that crashed in South Korea Last month, which killed 179 people, stopped registering about four minutes before the crash, South Korean officials said Saturday.
After analyzing the devices, the The US National Transportation Safety Board concluded. that both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped working about four minutes before the crash, South Korea’s Transportation Ministry said.
He Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air 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 examination after discovering some data was missing.
The Transport Ministry said it was not immediately clear why the devices had not recorded data in the last four minutes.
“CVR (cockpit voice recorder) and FDR (flight data recorder) data are crucial in accident investigations, but such investigations are carried out by examining and analyzing various sources of information, and we plan do everything possible to determine the cause of the accident,” the ministry said in a statement.
South Korean investigators have said air traffic controllers warned the pilot about possible bird strikes two minutes before the plane issued a distress signal confirming that a bird strike had occurred, after which the pilot attempted a landing. emergency.
Following the crash, authorities immediately ordered an inspection of all 737-800 aircraft operated by the country’s airlines (dozens of aircraft in total) following the crash.
South Korean officials have also pledged to improve airport security after experts linked the high death toll to the locator system at Muan airport, the structure hit by the plane when it crashed. The localizer, a set of antennas designed to guide planes during landings, was housed in a dirt-covered concrete structure on an elevated embankment. This has raised questions about whether the structure should have been built with lighter materials that would break more easily in the event of an impact.
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