The black boxes holding the flight data (FDR) and cockpit voice recorders (CVR) for the crashed Jeju Air flight that left 179 people dead stopped recording four minutes before the disaster, South Korea’s transport ministry said.
The Boeing 737-800 was flying from Thailand to Muan, South Korea, on Dec 29 carrying 181 passengers and crew when it belly-landed at the Muan airport and exploded in a fireball after slamming into a concrete barrier.
It was the worst-ever aviation disaster on South Korean soil.
“The analysis revealed that both the CVR and FDR data were not recorded during the four minutes leading up to the aircraft’s collision with the localiser,” the transport ministry said yesterday in a statement.
The localiser is a barrier at the end of the runway that helps with aircraft landings and was blamed for exacerbating the crash’s severity.
The damaged flight data recorder had been deemed unrecoverable for data extraction by South Korean authorities, who sent it to the United States for analysis at the US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory.
But it appears that the boxes holding clues to the flight’s final moments experienced data loss, leaving authorities trying to find out what happened.
“Plans are in place to investigate the cause of the data loss during the ongoing accident investigation,” the ministry said.
Investigators have pointed to a bird strike, faulty landing gear and the runway barrier as possible issues.
The pilot warned of a bird strike before pulling out of a first landing, then crashed on a second attempt when the landing gear did not emerge.
This week, lead investigator Lee Seung-yeol told reporters that “feathers were found” in one of the plane’s recovered engines, but cautioned a bird strike does not lead to an immediate engine failure. — AFP
