The wreck of crashed passenger plane is seen in the back in this photo taken at Muan International Airport, Muan County, South Jeolla Province, Sunday. Yonhap
One of the two black boxes retrieved from the Jeju Air plane that crashed in Korea on Sunday had sustained partial damage, likely further delaying the analysis to determine the cause of the accident, land ministry officials said.
According to an official of the ministry’s Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board, the flight data recorder (FDR) from the Boeing 737-800 aircraft plane that crashed at Muan International Airport in Muan, some 290 kilometers southwest of Seoul, had been damaged by the time it was collected.
The official added that the plane’s cockpit voice recorder (CVR) had remained intact in the crash, which killed 179 out of 181 people aboard.
The plane belly-landed following a bird strike warning from the control tower and slammed into a concrete wall before bursting into flames just after 9 a.m. Sunday.
Determining the exact cause of crashes of this magnitude typically takes months, and the damage to the FDR in this case could cause further delays, the board official said.
“Decoding the FDR alone could take about a month,” the official added.
If both devices are collected without damage, decoding could take as little as one week.
Another official from the investigation board said the FDR may have to be shipped to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for decoding, in which case the process could take at least six months.
“If we have difficulty decoding it here, then we may have to send it to the NTSB,” the second official said. “They have cases from all over the world to analyze, so it could take quite a bit of time.”
The FDR monitors altitude, airspeed and heading, while the CVR records radio transmissions and sounds in the cockpit, such as the pilot’s voices and engine noises.
Both are built to withstand an impact of 3,400 times the force of Earth’s gravity and temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Celsius.
They are installed in the tail section to minimize damage in crashes. In Sunday’s accident, only the two crew members who had been positioned in the tail of the plane survived. (Yonhap)
