The black boxes of the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 aircraft that crashed several weeks ago in Muan, South Korea, stopped working during the last four minutes of the flight. The crash killed 179 of the 181 people onboard.

Without the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, investigators now face a significant setback as they lack crucial information that promised to shed light on the incident. 

Missing Data from Onboard Flight and Voice Recorders

 
On Saturday, the South Korean Transport Ministry announced that the two black boxes, including the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, from Jeju Air Flight 2216 stopped recording four minutes before the fatal accident. Previously, investigators had said that the data contained inside the black boxes were key to determining the cause of the deadly crash.

These data recorders capture the aircraft’s movements, which could have helped to explain the teardrop maneuver and eventual belly landing, as well as the dialogue between pilots, which would have allowed investigators to understand the decisions made leading up to the deadly landing attempt. 

After the crash, South Korean officials analyzed the black boxes before sending them to the United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for further review. However, the NTSB confirmed what South Korean investigators already suspected: that some data was missing from the recorders. 

“Data from the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) and FDR (flight data recorder) are crucial in investigating accidents, but such investigations are conducted through the examination and analysis of various sources of information, and we plan to do our utmost to determine the cause of the accident,” the South Korean ministry said in a statement.

However, while the missing black boxes pose a major setback to the investigation, they may give investigators new insight into what happened following the bird strike. 

Around the time the data recorders failed, the pilots told air traffic controllers that they had suffered a bird strike, subsequently declaring an emergency. Since the flight data and voice recorders both failed directly following the bird strike, it suggests that all power systems failed, including the backup power systems that the black boxes rely on in the event of a power loss onboard the aircraft. 

If the aircraft did lose all power, it could explain part of the decision to “teardrop” back to the airport and land on the runway in the opposite direction. It could also possibly explain the failure of the landing gear and deployment of spoilers, which slow an aircraft down after landing. 

Investigators still have not reached any concrete conclusions about the cause of the crash, with the power failure discussed above only one possible explanation.