Investigators have revealed ‘black boxes’ from the Jeju Air plane that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording just four minutes before the aircraft exploded.
The Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed on December 29, 2024 at the Muan International Airport, located in southwest South Korea approximately 180 miles (290km) south of Seoul.
179 people of the 181 on board the aircraft died in the crash, while two crew members survived.
An investigation into the tragedy has since begun by South Korean authorities, but a cause of the crash has yet to be detailed.
Jeju Air CEO Kim Yi-bae previously said that pre-flight inspection of the Boeing 737-800, including its landing gear, showed ‘nothing abnormal’, BBC News reports.
Officials began by inspecting the aircraft’s black boxes, with an update on their findings being detailed to the public on Saturday (January 11).
And now, South Korea’s transport ministry confirmed that both the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) stopped working a mere minutes before the plane crashed, CNN reports.
It remains unclear what exactly caused the recorders to stop working at this time, but the ministry said they are working to find more answers, saying in a statement: “CVR and FDR data are important data for accident investigations, 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 cockpit voice recorder was initially analyzed in South Korea before being sent to the US for another look over, with the director of of the aviation policy division at the Ministry of Transport, Joo Jong-wan, previously explaining that South Korean analysts would still be participating in the process.
While the investigation into what happened continues, aviation expert Professor Ron Bartsch has said ‘something sinister’ may have happened on board.
Speaking on Australia‘s Today, Bartsch said: “I suspect that the initial reports that have indicated that birdstrike or weather may have been a contributing factor, but to me, that’s pretty unlikely that a birdstrike alone would be sufficient to bring down an aircraft or to foresee landing gear not to be able to be operative.”
He continued (via 9News): “Obviously the pilot would have known the high risk of landing without the availability of reverse thrust or flaps to slow the aircraft down coming into land.
“So it may have been, and this is only speculation, that there may have been something more sinister on board the aircraft that could have caused it.”
The expert concluded by describing the Boeing 737-800 as a ‘very reliable and safe aircraft’.
