Flight data and cockpit voice recorders on the Jeju Air plane that crashed in South Korea last month, killing 179 people, stopped recording about four minutes before the airliner hit a concrete structure at Muan airport, the transport ministry said.
Authorities investigating the disaster, the worst on South Korean soil, plan to analyse what caused the “black boxes” to stop recording, the ministry said.
The voice recorder was initially analysed in South Korea, and, when data was found to be missing, was then sent to a US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said.
The damaged flight data recorder was taken to the US for analysis in cooperation with the US safety regulator, the ministry said.
Jeju Air flight 7C2216, which departed the Thai capital, Bangkok, for Muan in south-western South Korea, belly-landed and overshot the regional airport’s runway, exploding into flames after hitting an embankment.
The pilots told air traffic control the aircraft had suffered a bird strike and declared an emergency about four minutes before it crashed. Two injured crew members, sitting in the tail section, were rescued.
Sim Jai-dong, a former transport ministry accident investigator, said the discovery of the missing data from the crucial final minutes was surprising and suggested all power including backup may have been cut, which is rare.
The transport ministry said other data was available and would be used in the investigation, which it said would be transparent, with information being shared with the victims’ families.
Some members of the victims’ families have said the ministry should not take the lead in the investigation, but that it should involve independent experts, including those recommended by the families.
The investigation of the crash has also focused on the embankment, which was designed to prop up the “localiser” system, used to assist aircraft landing, raising questions as to why it was built with such rigid material and so close to the end of the runway.