The black boxes of the crashed Jeju Air plane stopped recording flight data four minutes before the aircraft collided with a wall and exploded after attempting an emergency landing in the worst accident in the history of Korean aviation, the South Korean Ministry of Transportation reported this Saturday.
This finding hinders the investigation of the causes of the aviation accident occurred on December 29 at the Muan airport (southwest of South Korea), which left 179 dead.
Analysis of recordings of pilots’ voices in the plane’s cockpit and flight data carried out by the United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) shows that those logs stopped at 8:59 local time.
The explosion of the Boeing 737-800 took place at 9:03just after the plane crashed into a concrete wall off the runway after touching down without activating the landing gear or other braking devices.
Minutes before touching down, the pilot of flight 7C2216 had issued a distress alert and notified the air traffic control tower that the aircraft had been affected by a bird strike.
The South Korean Ministry of Transportation noted that although the data from the black boxes is fundamental to the investigation of the accident, These are not your only sources for information about it..
The South Korean authorities will continue analyzing air traffic recordsvideo recordings of the accident and the remains found at the scene of the accident.
The South Korean ministry had sent the contents of the black boxes to the NTSB last week for double verification.
The accident, which Only two members of the plane’s crew survived.has led the low-cost airline Jeju Air to cut its flights from Busan (southeast of the country) during the first quarter to strengthen its aircraft maintenance operations, in full scrutiny of the causes of the accident.
