Flight recorders from the passenger plane that crashed in South Korea last month, killing more than 170 people, stopped working minutes before the plane belly-landed and exploded on the runway, investigators said Saturday.
Officials investigating the country's deadliest aviation accident in nearly three decades had hoped that information from the so-called black boxes would shed light on why Jeju Air Flight 7C 2216 from Bangkok belly-landed at Muan International Airport on December 29 and burst into a fireball.
179 passengers and crew died in the disaster. Two people survived.
But South Korea's Ministry of Transport said on Saturday that both the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) of the Boeing 737-800 stopped working about four minutes before the crash.
In a statement, the ministry said it was unclear why the devices stopped recording, adding that it will work to determine the cause.
“CVR and FDR data are important data for accident investigation, 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.
The flight data recorder of Jeju Air Flight 7C 2216. – Lee Geun-Yong/South Korean Government/Reuters
The cockpit voice recorder was first analyzed locally and later sent to the United States for cross-checking, the ministry said.
The flight data recorder, which was damaged and missing a connector, was sent to the US National Transportation Safety Board for analysis last week after South Korean authorities concluded they could not extract data from the device due to the damage.
CNN has contacted the NTSB for comment.
The crash was the country's deadliest since 1997, when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed in the jungles of Guam, killing 228 lives.
It is not yet clear what causes this; the investigation is expected to last months.
Images of the crash showed that neither the rear nor the front landing gear were visible at the time of the emergency landing.
Before the emergency landing, the pilot made a distress call and used the terms “bird strike” and “go-around,” according to officials, who also said the control tower alerted the pilot to birds in the area.
Another point of contention was the concrete embankment that the plane hit upon landing. According to aviation experts, many airports do not have similar structures so close to runways.
South Korean police also raided the Seoul office of Jeju Air and the operator of Muan International Airport last week as part of their investigation, Reuters reported.
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