Black Boxes of South Korean Plane Stopped Recording Four Minutes Before Crash

Investigators relied on the black boxes of the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 to clarify the reasons for its crash at South Korea's Muan airport on December 29, resulting in the deaths of 179 passengers. However, aviation authorities believe this possibility has been thwarted after confirming that the two devices stopped recording four minutes before the aircraft crashed into a wall during the emergency landing.

A statement from the South Korean government details that the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder "did not record during the four minutes prior to the collision" of the aircraft arriving from Bangkok. This time lapse would approximately coincide with the period between a flock of birds striking the aircraft and its explosion upon colliding with the wall after skidding along the runway without landing gear.

Investigators are considering all hypotheses regarding the accident: the collision with birds, a failure in the landing gear, which the pilots failed to deploy, and the presence of the wall at the end of the runway. Authorities are investigating the South Korean fleet of planes belonging to the same model as the crashed one, as they find it unusual for an engine to fail due to bird impact while simultaneously the landing system malfunctioned.