Flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the Jeju Air flight that crashed at South Korea's Muan International Airport stopped recording four minutes before the tragedy that claimed 179 lives.
On December 29, a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 traveling from Bangkok to Muan belly-landed, overshooting the runway and colliding with a concrete embankment before erupting into flames, CNN reported.
Preliminary findings indicate the pilots had reported a bird strike and declared an emergency minutes before the crash, but investigators are now dealing with the absence of crucial data from the aircraft's black boxes.
Investigators have sent the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the severely damaged flight data recorder (FDR) to the United States for further analysis after local efforts to retrieve information were unsuccessful.
Both the CVR and FDR stopped recording about four minutes before the plane crashed, according to South Korea's transport ministry.
The missing data from the final moments of the flight 7C 2216 has sparked speculation about a potential power failure, which experts say is highly unusual.
The Transport Ministry has promised a thorough investigation, which is expected to take months and aims to determine the exact cause of the crash.
Authorities are also scrutinizing the embankment design and placement, with critics questioning why such a rigid structure was so close to the runway.
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