South Korea says black boxes on Jeju Air jet stopped recording four minutes before deadly crash

SEOUL – The black boxes holding the flight data and cockpit voice recorders for the crashed Jeju Air flight that left 179 people dead stopped recording four minutes before the disaster, South Korea’s transport ministry says.

The Boeing 737-800 was flying from Thailand to Muan, South Korea, on December 29 carrying 181 passengers and crew when it belly-landed at the Muan airport and exploded in a fireball after slamming into a concrete barrier.

“The analysis revealed that both the CVR and FDR data were not recorded during the four minutes leading up to the aircraft’s collision with the localizer,” the transport ministry says in a statement, referring to the two recording devices.

The localizer is a barrier at the end of the runway that helps with aircraft landings and was blamed for exacerbating the crash’s severity.

The damaged flight data recorder had been deemed unrecoverable for data extraction by South Korean authorities, who sent it to the United States for analysis at the US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory.

But it appears that the boxes holding clues to the flight’s final moments experienced data loss, leaving authorities trying to find out what happened.

South Korean and US investigators are still probing the cause of the crash.