Black boxes from South Korea plane crash failed to record final 4 minutes, officials say

South Korean officials stated on Saturday that the black boxes from the Boeing airliner that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording about four minutes before the accident, potentially complicating the investigation into the cause of the disaster that killed 179 people. The South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that after analyzing the devices, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder stopped working approximately four minutes before the crash.

The Boeing 737-800, operated by Jeju Air, skidded off the runway in Muan, South Korea on December 29 due to its landing gear failing to deploy, hitting a concrete structure and catching fire, killing all but two of the 181 people on board. After an initial analysis of the black boxes, South Korean officials discovered some missing data and sent the devices to the NTSB for a more thorough examination. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport stated that it is currently unclear why the devices failed to record data during the final four minutes.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport stated in a release, “Data from the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) and FDR (flight data recorder) are crucial for investigating the accident, but such investigations are conducted by examining and analyzing various sources of information, and we plan to do our best to determine the cause of the accident.”

South Korean investigators said that air traffic controllers warned the pilots of a possible bird strike two minutes before the plane issued a distress signal confirming a bird strike, after which the pilots attempted an emergency landing. South Korean officials have also pledged to improve airport safety after experts linked the high death toll to the Muan airport’s locator system, a set of antennas used to guide aircraft for landing, installed in a concrete structure covered in dirt, located on an elevated embankment. This has raised questions about whether the structure should have been built using lighter materials that would break more easily upon impact.