SEOUL (Reuters) – The flight data and cockpit voice recorders of the Jeju Air plane that crashed on December 29 stopped recording about four minutes before the plane hit a concrete structure at Seoul airport. Muan in South Korea, the Ministry of Transportation 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 data was found to be missing, it was sent to a U.S. National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said.
The damaged flight data recorder was brought to the United States for analysis in cooperation with the US safety regulator, the ministry said.
Jeju Air plane 7C2216, which left Bangkok, the Thai capital, for Muan, in southwestern South Korea, landed upside down and skidded off the runway at the regional airport, exploding in flames after hitting an embankment.
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 embankment and exploded in flames. Two injured crew members, sitting in the tail section, were rescued.