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Written by Hyunjoo Jin and Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) – Flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the Jeju Air jet that crashed on Dec. 29 stopped recording about four minutes before the plane hit a concrete building at Muan Airport in South Korea, the transportation agency said on Saturday.
Officials investigating the disaster that killed 179 people, the worst on South Korean soil, plan to investigate what caused the “black boxes” to stop recording, it said. department.
The voice recorder was analyzed in South Korea and, when the data was found to be missing, it was sent to the US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the agency said.
The damaged data printer was taken to the United States for examination in cooperation with the US safety regulator, the agency said.
Jeju Air 7C2216, which flew from the Thai capital Bangkok to Muan in southwestern South Korea, went belly-up and covered the runway of the local airport, bursting into flames after hit the rock.
The pilots told air traffic control that the plane had been hit by a bird strike and declared an emergency four minutes before it crashed into a wall bursting with flames. Two injured workers who were sitting in the tail section, were rescued.
Two minutes before the Mayday emergency call, air traffic control warned of “bird activity”. When they declared an emergency, the pilots abandoned the landing attempt and began a go-around.
But instead of taking off completely, the Boeing (NYSE: ) 737-800 jet made a sharp turn and approached the airport’s single runway from the opposite end, of crash without landing gear.
Sim Jai-dong, a former accident investigator at the transport department, said the discovery of missing data in the last critical minutes was surprising and suggested that all power including backup may have been cut. which is unusual.
The Ministry of Transport said that any available information will be used in the investigation and that it will ensure that the investigation is transparent and that information is shared with the families of the victims.
Some of the victims’ families said that the transport ministry should not lead the investigation but should involve independent experts including those recommended by the families.
The investigation into the disaster also focused on the dam, which was designed to support the “localiser” system used to help the plane land, including why it was built with such tough materials. and near the end of the runway.
