By Hyunjo Jin and Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) – Flight data and the cockpit voice recorder on a Jeju Air plane that crashed on Dec 29 stopped recording about four minutes before the plane crashed into a concrete structure at South Korea’s Muan airport, the transport ministry said on Saturday.
Authorities investigating the disaster that killed 179 people, the worst on South Korean soil, plan to analyze what caused the black boxes to stop recording, the ministry said in a statement.
The voice recorder was initially analyzed in South Korea and, when no data was missing, sent to a US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said.
The damaged flight data recorder was taken to the United States for analysis in cooperation with the US safety regulator, the ministry said.
Jeju Air 7C2216, which had taken off from the Thai capital of Bangkok in Muang, southwest South Korea, made a belly landing and overran the regional airport’s runway, bursting into flames after hitting the beach.
The pilots told air traffic control that the plane had suffered a bird strike and declared an emergency about four minutes before it crashed into the beach and burst into flames. Two injured crew members who were sitting in the tail compartment were rescued.
Two minutes before Mayday’s emergency call, air traffic control issued a “bird activity” alert. Declaring an emergency, the pilots abandoned the landing attempt and began a run.
But instead of fully departing, the budget airline’s Boeing (NYSE: ) 737-800 jet made a sharp turn and approached the opposite end of one of the airport’s runways, making an emergency landing without landing gear.
Sim Jai-dong, a former accident investigator at the Transport Ministry, said the discovery of the missing data in the crucial final minutes was surprising, suggesting that all power, including the backup system, may have been cut, which is rare.
The Ministry of Transport said that other available data will be used in the investigation and that it will ensure the transparency of the investigation and the sharing of information with the families of the victims.
Some family members of the victims said the Ministry of Transport should not take the lead in the investigation, but should involve independent experts, including recommendations from the families.
The crash investigation is also focusing on the embankment, which was designed to power the “localizer” system used to help the plane land, including why it was built with such rigid material and so close to the end of the runway.