The two black boxes of the Boeing plane that crashed in South Korea's worst plane crash stopped recording about four minutes before the crash, the country's transportation ministry said on Saturday, UNN reports citing Reuters.
Details
Earlier, South Korean investigators said that flight data and onboard voice recorders played a key role in determining the cause of last month's crash, which killed 179 people.
This happened about four minutes after the pilot of the Jeju Air airliner reported a collision with a bird.
Authorities investigating the crash 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 it was found to be missing data, it was sent to the laboratory of the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States, the ministry said.
Black box recorders collect data on pilot conversations in the cockpit, as well as on how the aircraft's systems work in flight.
A Jeju Air 7C2216 flying from Thailand's capital Bangkok to Muan in southwestern South Korea landed on its belly and rolled off the runway at the regional airport on December 29, exploding after hitting an embankment. Only two people survived - the crew members sitting in the tail section.
Two minutes before the pilots announced the Mayday emergency, air traffic control warned of bird activity.
Sim Jai-dong, a former accident investigator at the Ministry of Transportation, said the discovery of missing data in the crucial final minutes of the budget airline's Boeing 737-800 was unexpected and suggests that all power, including backup power, may have been cut off, which is rare.
The Ministry of Transportation stated that other available data would be used in the investigation and that this would ensure transparency of the investigation and provide information to the victims' families.
The investigation also focused on the embankment into which the plane crashed, which was designed to support a "locator" system used to help aircraft land, including why it was built of such a rigid material and so close to the end of the runway.