South Korea claims Jeju Air’s black boxes stopped recording before the crash

SEOUL: Black boxes storing flight data and voice recorders in the cockpit of the Jeju Air plane that crashed, killing 179 people, stopped recording four minutes before the crash, South Korea’s transport ministry said on Saturday (Jan 11). .

On December 29, a Boeing 737-800 was flying from Thailand to Muang, South Korea, carrying 181 passengers and crew, when it landed on its belly at Muang Airport and exploded in a fireball, crashing into a concrete barrier.

It was the worst plane crash in history on South Korean soil.

“Analysis showed that CVR and FDR data were not recorded for four minutes before the aircraft collided with the localizer,” the transport ministry said in a statement, referring to the two recording devices.

The localizer is a barrier at the end of the runway that helps planes land and has been blamed for increasing the severity of the crash.

South Korean authorities deemed the damaged flight data recorder beyond repair and sent it to the United States for analysis at a US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory.

But it turned out that the boxes containing clues about the last moments of the flight had lost data, so the authorities tried to find out what happened.

“It is planned to investigate the cause of the data loss during the ongoing investigation of the accident,” the ministry said.

South Korean and American investigators are still looking into the cause of the disaster, which sparked national mourning with memorials erected across the country.