Jeju Air black boxes stopped working minutes before crash in South Korea
The two flight recorders on board a South Korean airliner stopped working before the jet crashed during an emergency landing and subsequent crash that killed 179 of the 181 people on board, officials said on Saturday.
The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, commonly called black boxes, both stopped functioning around four minutes before Jeju Air flight 2216 crashed at Muan International Airport, South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport confirmed on Saturday in a statement.
Officials did not speculate on why the devices may have stopped working on the Boeing 737-800 that was arriving from Bangkok, Thailand.
Two people survived the crash on December 29, after the passenger jet made a belly landing at the airport at 9.03 a.m. local time, eventually bursting into flames after running off the end of the runaway.
Both flight recorders were recovered from the crash and shipped to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board’s facilities in Washington, D.C. for analysis. The cockpit voice recorder was sent Monday accompanied by NTSB investigators. The flight data recorder was damaged and sent later after South Korean officials were unable to repair it.
“CVR and FDR data are important data for accident investigations, but accident investigations are conducted through investigation and analysis of various data, so we plan to do our best to accurately identify the cause of the accident,” the ministry said in the statement.
Following the crash, Boeing said it stood ready to assist with the air accident investigation.
South Korea later ordered an emergency inspection of the country’s aviation system after the worst aviation accident ever on Korean soil. The crash was also the deadliest accident involving a South Korean aircraft since Korean Air flight 801 crashed in Guam in 1997, killing 228 people. (UPI)
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