South Korea's Ministry of Transport said Wednesday that data has been extracted from one of the black boxes ( Cockpit Voice Recorder and Flight data Recorder) of the aircraft that crashed in South Korea last weekend, killing 179 people while two survivors were rescued.
"The extracted information will begin to be converted into audio files starting today," a spokesman for the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport told a news conference.
The data collected corresponds to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), which was found in good condition among the remains of the aircraft.
Vice Minister Joo announced earlier on Wednesday that investigators had extracted the first data from one of the black boxes of Jeju Air Flight 2216.
Initial extraction of the cockpit voice recorder “has already been completed,” Joo said. “Based on this preliminary data, we plan to begin converting it into an audio format,” he added.
The other black box, the flight data recorder (FDR), however, suffered some damage, meaning recovering the information could take months, South Korean authorities said at the time.
The second black box (FDR) from the crashed plane was also recovered but "was found without a connector," the deputy minister said. Hours later he said it would be sent to the United States.
"The damaged flight data recorder was deemed unrecoverable for nationwide data extraction," said Joo Jong-wan, vice minister in charge of civil aviation.
For this reason, he said, "it was agreed to transport it to the United States for analysis by the National Transportation Safety Board" of that country.
It's to be noted that the South Korean low-cost airline Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 plane from Thailand operating Flight 7C2216, with 181 people on board, made an emergency landing on Sunday, without deploying its landing gear, at the airport in the city of Muan, in southwestern South Korea on Sunday.
The accident left 179 dead and only two survivors, making it the worst civil aviation accident ever to occur on South Korean soil and the worst in 2024 globally.
The data from the black boxes will be key in the investigation of an event still full of unknowns, starting with the possibility that it was a bird strike that caused the tragedy.
Minutes before landing, the control tower issued an alert due to the proximity of birds to the aircraft, and shortly afterwards the pilot activated a distress alert and proceeded to make an emergency landing without apparently activating any of the plane's braking mechanisms, which ended up crashing into a cement structure.
The concrete structure housed an antenna for the Instrument Landing System (ILS), which is essential for the pilot to align the plane horizontally with the runway before landing the aircraft, and was the focus of on-site investigations into the accident in this case, which were joined by two additional members of the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
The impact against the structure is believed to have been a determining reason for the high mortality rate in the accident.
In total, five NTSB members and four representatives from the manufacturer Boeing joined 11 officials from the South Korean Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board to analyze the incident on the ground.
The data from the black boxes will be key in the investigation of an event still full of unknowns , starting with the possibility that it was a bird strike that caused the tragedy.
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