Jeju Air’s black boxes stopped recording four minutes before the South Korean passenger plane crashed

Black boxes storing flight data and voice recorders in the cockpit of the South Korean passenger plane that crashed, killing 179 people, stopped recording four minutes before the crash, officials said.

Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 7C2216 was flying from the Thai capital of Bangkok to Muang, South Korea on December 29 when it made an emergency landing, skidded off the runway and onto a wall and exploded.

Of the 175 passengers and six crew members on board, only two crew members survived and were pulled from the wreckage at Muang International Airport, about 280 miles south of Seoul.

The authorities are investigating the disaster South Korea’s transport ministry said on Saturday it plans to investigate what caused black box recording to stop.

The recorder was first analyzed in South Korea. When the data was found to be missing, it was sent to the US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said.

The damaged flight recorder was also flown to the United States for analysis in cooperation with the US safety regulator.

Sim Jae-dong, a former accident investigator at the Ministry of Transport, said discovery missing data in the crucial final minutes was unexpected.

He added that this suggests that all power, including backup power, could have been shut down, which is rare.

The pilots informed the air traffic controller the plane collided with birds and declared an emergency about four minutes before it crashed.

Earlier this week, lead researcher Lee Seung-yeol said feathers were found in one of the engines found at the crash site.

He added video footage that showed the bird hitting one of the engines.

Although authorities previously said they suspected a bird strike may have played a role in the crash, it has not yet been confirmed why the landing gear did not deploy or what led to the crash landing.

The plane is believed to have exploded on impact with a concrete wall at the end of the runway, and experts question why he ended up there.

The police are also investigating how the airfield wall into which the plane crashed was built.