Jeju Air’s black boxes stopped recording before the plane crashed, South Korea said Aviation News

The Ministry of Transport is investigating the cause of the loss of information following the worst air disaster in the country’s history.

The black boxes that hold the flight information and voice recorders of Jeju Air’s Boeing 737-800 stopped recording about four minutes before the plane’s disaster in South Korea in December, the country’s Ministry of Transportation said.

Jeju Air’s Flight 7C2216 was flying from Thailand to Muan International Airport in South Korea on December 29, when it landed belly down, hit a concrete barrier and exploded, killing 179 of the 181 passengers and crew.

It was the world’s worst air disaster in South Korea.

“Analysis revealed that both CVR and FDR data were not recorded in the four minutes before the plane collided with a local,” South Korea’s Ministry of Transport said on Saturday, referring to the two recording devices.

A worker at the end of the runway is a barrier that helps the planes land and was blamed for exacerbating the severity of the crash.

The voice recorder was first analyzed in South Korea, and when the information was not available, it was sent to a laboratory of the United States Transportation Security Board, the department said.

But it appears that the boxes containing the flight’s final flight times have lost data, leaving authorities scrambling to figure out what happened.

“Plans are in place to investigate the cause of the data loss during the ongoing accident investigation,” the department said.

Sim Jai-dong, a former accident investigator at the Ministry of Transportation, told Reuters news agency that the discovery of the missing data was surprising and suggested that all power, including backup, may have been cut off on the plane, which is rare.

Investigators said the boxes were key to their investigation but said they would not give up trying to find out why the accident happened.

Investigators identified bird strike, improper landing gear and runway obstruction as possible problems.

The pilot had also warned of bird strikes before he left his first landing spot and began to circle.

But instead of going all the way, the Boeing 737-800 plane turned quickly and approached the airport’s one runway from the opposite direction, and crashed without the landing gear being deployed.

This week, lead investigator Lee Seung-yeol told reporters that “feathers were found” in one of the recovered plane’s engines, but cautioned that bird strikes do not lead to immediate engine failure.

Authorities raided the offices of Muan Airport where the crash occurred, the regional aviation office in the southwestern city, and Jeju Air’s office in the capital, Seoul.

They also prevented the chief executive of Jeju Air from leaving the country.

As the investigation continues, Transport Minister Park Sang-woo announced his resignation earlier this week, saying he felt “great responsibility for this tragedy”.