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By Hyunjo Jin and Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) – The flight data and cockpit voice recorders of the Jeju Air jet that crashed on December 29 stopped recording about four minutes before the airliner hit a concrete structure at South Korea’s Mueang airport, the transport ministry said on Saturday.
The ministry said in a statement that it plans to analyze what caused “black boxes” to stop recording, which is investigating the disaster that killed 179 people, South Korea’s worst disaster on earth.
The voice recorder was first analyzed in South Korea, and when the data was found to be missing, it was sent to a US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said.
The ministry announced that the damaged flight data recorder has been taken to the US for analysis in cooperation with the US safety inspector.
Jeju Air 7C2216, en route from Thailand’s capital Bangkok to Mueang in southwestern South Korea, landed on its belly, skidded off the regional airport’s runway and burst into flames after hitting the border.
The pilots announced to air traffic control that the plane had experienced a bird strike and a sudden fire had occurred four minutes earlier. Two injured crew members sitting in the tail section survived.
Two minutes before Mayday’s emergency call, air traffic control issued a warning for “bird movement”. Declaring an emergency, the pilots abandoned the landing attempt and began a go-around.
But instead of making a full flight, the budget airline’s Boeing (NYSE: ) 737-800 jet made a sharp turn near the opposite end of the airport’s single runway and crash-landed without deploying its landing gear.
Former Transport Ministry accident investigator Sim Jai Dong said the missing data from the crucial final minutes was surprising, suggesting that all power, including backup, may have been cut, which is rare.
The Ministry of Transport stated that other available information will be used in the investigation and said that the investigation will be transparent and the information will be delivered to the families of the victims.
Some victims’ families said the Ministry of Transport should not take the lead in the investigation but should involve independent experts, including those suggested by their families.
The crash investigation also focused on the enclosure, which was designed to house the plane’s “localiser” system to help it land, because it is built of solid material and is close to the end of the runway.
