Seoul, South Korea:
South Korean investigators investigating a Jeju Air crash that killed 179 people in its territory's worst aviation disaster said Wednesday they will send one of the recovered black boxes to the United States for analysis.
The plane was carrying 181 people from Thailand on Sunday when it issued a distress call and made a belly landing before hitting a barrier and bursting into flames, killing everyone on board except two flight attendants who were pulled from the burning wreckage.
South Korean and American investigators, including from Boeing, have been searching the crash site in the southwest of Muan since the disaster on Sunday.
“The damaged flight data recorder is deemed beyond repair for data extraction domestically,” South Korean Vice Minister of Civil Aviation Joo Jong-wan said.
“Today it has been agreed to transport it to the United States for analysis, in coordination with the US National Transportation Safety Board.”
Joo said earlier that both black boxes from the plane had been recovered, and that for the cockpit voice recorder, “the first extraction has already been completed.”
“Based on this preliminary data, we plan to convert it into audio format,” he said, which meant investigators would be able to hear the pilots' latest communications.
The second black box, the flight data recorder, “was found with a missing connector,” Joo said.
“Experts are currently conducting a final evaluation to determine how to extract data from it.”
Officials initially pointed to a bird strike as a possible cause of the disaster, but they have since said the probe also examined a concrete barrier at the end of the runway, which dramatic video showed the Boeing 737-800 colliding before it caught fire. .
They also said a special inspection of all local airlines' Boeing 737-800 models examined the landing gear after questions about a possible mechanical failure during the crash.
The ongoing inspections are “mainly focused on the landing gear, which failed to deploy properly in this case,” Aviation Safety Policy Director General Yoo Kyeong-soo said.
Local media reported that the landing gear deployed correctly on the first failed landing attempt of Jeju Air Flight 2216 at Muan Airport, before failing on the second.
The matter “will likely be investigated by the Accident Investigation Board through a comprehensive review of various testimonies and evidence during the investigation process,” the Ministry of Lands, which oversees civil aviation, said at a briefing.
All victims identified
At Muan airport, grieving families of the victims grew increasingly frustrated by delays in identifying and releasing the bodies.
Officials have said the bodies were badly damaged in the crash, leaving identification work slow and enormously difficult, even as investigators had to preserve evidence at the crash site.
But the country's acting President Choi Sang-mok, who has been in office for less than a week, said on Wednesday that the process had finally been completed and more bodies had been handed over to relatives so they could hold funerals.
“Our investigators, along with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the manufacturer, are conducting a joint investigation into the cause of the accident,” Choi said at an emergency response meeting on Wednesday.
“A comprehensive analysis and assessment of the aircraft structure and black box data will reveal the cause of the accident,” Choi added.
The US investigators had arrived on Monday and headed straight to Muan, with the first joint investigation on the ground focusing on a navigation system known as a localiser that aids in plane landings.
The localiser, installed on a concrete structure at Muan International Airport, is the barrier blamed for worsening the severity of the Jeju Air crash.
The plane was carrying mostly holidaymakers from year-end holidays to Bangkok, with all passengers being Korean nationals except two Thais.
A fuller account of what went wrong in the final moments of the flight is expected once authorities analyze the black boxes.
Memorial altars for the victims have been set up nationwide, including in Seoul and at Muan Airport.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)