South Korea aircraft crash black bins lacking final 4 essential minutes of knowledge
The black box of the doomed Jeju Air flight that killed 179 people when it crash landed in South Korea stopped recording four minutes before it slammed into a wall
The flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the South Korean passenger plane that crashed last month, killing all but two people on board, stopped recording four minutes before the horror crash – the nation’s transport ministry said.
The Jeju Air flight killed 179 people when it slammed into a concrete wall at Muan International Airport, South Korea, and exploded into a huge fireball. Only two cabin crew members survived. The disaster is the deadliest aviation accident in the country.
Authorities had been holding on to the hope that the plane’s flight data would cast some light on the crucial moments before the nightmare crash occurred.
The ministry said it would analyse why the plane’s black boxes stopped recording. When it was discovered the data was missing, the black boxes were taken to the US and analysed by American safety regulators.
The plane in its final moments of its journey from Bangkok, Thailand on December 29 when it crash-landed at the Muan International Airport and careered into a wall at the end of the runway and exploded into flames.
Former transport ministry accident investigator Sim Jai-dong said that the loss of data from the critical last minutes was surprising.
He added that it could indicate that all power, including back-up, could have been cut.
Many questions remain over the incident. Alex Macheras, an aviation analyst and consultant, remarked: “This tragic event raises urgent and complex questions for investigators.
“Initial attention will focus on reports of a bird strike during the aircraft’s approach to Muan, a location where the risk of bird strikes is particularly high due to nearby fields and coastal areas.”
However, he added: “While bird strikes can severely impact an aircraft, the investigation must also probe deeper into why the landing gear was not deployed, why gravity drop – a manual safety mechanism for deploying landing gear – appears to have not been used, and why the aircraft was travelling at such high speed during its final approach.
