The flight recorder of the Jeju Air passenger plane which he collapsed last month, which killed 179 people, stopped recording its final four minutes, South Korean officials said Saturday, a significant step back for investigators.
Data extracted from the so-called black box, which consists of the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, is generally crucial in aviation accident investigations. Officials in South Korea, working with the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board, said the plane’s flight data the last four minutesIt would be especially important in this accident
But on Saturday, South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that for as yet unspecified reasons, the black box of the Boeing 737-800 then stopped recording.
“We plan to investigate why the data was not recorded,” the ministry said in a press release. It also said other data and analysis would be used to try to understand what happened in last month’s disaster.
Jeju Air Flight 7C2216, arriving from Bangkok with 181 people on board, was preparing to land at Muan International Airport in southwestern South Korea at 8:59 a.m. on Dec. 29 when its pilot reported, “Mayday, mayday, mayday ,” and, “Bird strike, bird strike,” according to officials. The pilot also told the air traffic control tower to “go around,” meaning he would abort his first landing attempt and circle in the air to prepare for the second.
But apparently he didn’t have enough time to make a full circle. Instead, the plane approached the runway from the opposite direction and landed on its belly, without the landing gear deployed. Seemingly unable to control his speed, he flew over the runway. Four minutes after the emergency Mayday report, the plane hit a concrete structure at the southern end of the runway and burst into flames.
The key question was: What happened during those four minutes?
“The black box data is crucial in the investigation,” said Hwang Ho-won, president of the Korea Aviation Safety Association. “If the investigators don’t have it, it’s going to create a serious problem for them.”
The missing data adds mystery to the crash, which was the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil and the world’s deadliest since Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018, which killed all 189 people on board.
Mr. Hwang said black boxes can be damaged by impact, fire or prolonged exposure to deep water. But it was hard to explain how Jeju Air’s black box failed to record in the last four minutes, he said.
He said investigators may be able to reconstruct part of the cockpit conversation based on conversations with control tower officials. Radar and other data indicated the plane tried but failed to gain altitude after reporting a bird strike and rushed to land, Mr. Hwang said.
Investigators said they were looking at various possibilities, including that the plane lost use of one or both engines in the final minutes.
Most of the 179 people who died were South Koreans returning home from a Christmas holiday in Thailand. The two survivors were crew members found with injuries in the tail section of the aircraft.
The disaster sparked a national outpouring of grief, with memorials erected across South Korea, and came at a time when the country was also dealing with political crisis triggered by the short-lived imposition of martial law by President Yoon Suk Yeol and his impeachment by parliament.
