New evidence has been uncovered from the wreckage of Jeju Air flight 7C2216 after its crash landing at Muan International Airport, South Korea.
After travelling from Bangkok, Thailand, the aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing in Muan at 9:03 am local time.
The Jeju Air plane could be seen skidding at speed down the runway with no landing gear, as it collided with a concrete wall, bursting into a giant ball of fire, as eyewitnesses claiming that they heard a ‘series of explosions’ as well as ‘metallic scraping’.
Only two of the 181 onboard survived, though their first words were shared after regaining consciousness in hospital.
Both were cabin crew members and they were sat in the tail of the plane, the only part of the plane that wasn’t completely decimated by the crash, according to The South Korean National Fire Agency.
Now the investigation around the cause of the aircraft has progressed as authorities have uncovered the black box voice recordings, the BBC reports.
The Transport Ministry said that data has been extracted and turned into voice files, which could help them understand the final minutes of the aircraft before crashing.
It can take around two days for investigators to convert the files in question, they added.
Though the flight recorder was retrieved, it was damaged and missing a connector that links its data storage unit to the power supply, which investigators say makes it unfeasible to locally decode the recorder, the BBC say.
The director of the aviation policy division at the Ministry of Transport, Joo Jong-wan, explained (via Yonhap News Agency): “We have determined that extracting data from the damaged flight data recorder here is not possible.
“And so we have agreed with the NTSB to send it to the US and analyze it there.”
Joo went on to say that South Korean analysts will still participate in the data process.
Yonhap also reported that authorities had processed data from the cockpit voice data recorder into voice files, which was located in better condition.
Prior to the crash, the Muan International Airport traffic control sent out a warning to the passenger plane about a bird strike, which led the pilot to send out a mayday call before performing the emergency landing.
One of the surviving crew members was also reported to have mentioned a bird strike when being rescued from the wreckage, as well as a final text message from a passenger also describing a bird being ‘stuck in the wing’ of the plane.
However, an investigation into the exact cause of the crash is ongoing.
