Investigators said Saturday that the flight recording boxes of the passenger plane that crashed in South Korea last month, killing more than 170 people, stopped working minutes before the plane touched down and exploded on the runway.
Officials investigating the country’s deadliest aviation accident in nearly three decades had hoped information from so-called black boxes would shed light on why Jeju Air flight 7C 2216 from Bangkok landed at Muan International Airport on December 29 and turned into a crash. Fireball.
The disaster 179 passengers and crew were killed. Two people survived.
But South Korea’s Ministry of Transport said on Saturday that the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) on the Boeing 737-800 stopped working about four minutes before the plane crashed.
The ministry said in a statement that it was not clear why the devices stopped recording, adding that it would work to determine the reason.
“CVR and FDR data are important data for accident investigations, but accident investigations are carried out through investigation and analysis of various data, so we plan to do our best to accurately determine the cause of the accident,” the ministry said.
Flight data recorder for Jeju Airlines Flight 7C 2216. — Lee Geun-young/South Korean Government/Reuters
The cockpit voice recorder was first analyzed locally and then sent to the United States for examination, the ministry said.
The flight data recorder, which was damaged and the connector missing, It has been sent To the US National Transportation Safety Board last week for analysis, after South Korean authorities concluded they could not extract data from the device, due to the damage.
CNN has contacted the NTSB for comment.
The accident was the country’s deadliest since 1997, when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed in a Guam jungle, killing 228 people.
The reason for this is not yet clear investigation It is expected to take months.
Footage of the accident showed that no rear or front landing gear was visible at the time the plane landed.
Before the emergency landing, the pilot made a mayday call and used the terms “bird strike” and “roaming,” according to officials, who also said the control tower warned the pilot that birds were in the area.
Another point of dispute It is the concrete bridge that the plane collided with when landing. Not many airports have similar structures so close to runways, according to aviation experts.
Reuters reported that last week, South Korean police also raided the Seoul office of Jeju Airlines and the operator of Muan International Airport as part of their investigations.
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