Black Boxes From South Korea Plane Crash Failed To Record Final 4 Minutes, Officials Say
HuffPost
Officials say the black boxes of a Boeing jetliner that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording about four minutes before the accident.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The black boxes of a Boeing jetliner that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording about four minutes before the accident, South Korean officials said Saturday, possibly complicating investigations into the cause of the disaster that killed 179 people.
After analyzing the devices, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped working about four minutes before the crash, the South Korean Transportation Ministry said.
The Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air skidded off a runway in the South Korean town of Muan on Dec. 29 after its landing gear failed to deploy, slamming into a concrete structure and bursting into flames, killing all but two of the 181 people on board.
After initially analyzing the black boxes, South Korean officials sent the devices to the NTSB for closer examination after discovering that some of the data was missing. The transportation ministry said it wasn’t immediately clear why the devices failed to record data in the last four minutes.
“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 ministry said in a statement.
“You have to stay cool,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the German magazine Stern.
"I would very much like President Trump’s unpredictability to be directed primarily toward the Russian Federation,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
South Korean investigators left the president’s official residence after a nearly six-hour standoff during which he defied their attempt to detain him.
The government may try to impose a total ban on weapons “because we must ask ourselves after this who should be allowed to have guns in Montenegro," the prime minister said.
Families of the victims were taken to the crash site for the first time on New Year's Day to pay their respects.
Palestinian medics say Israeli strikes have killed at least 12 people in the Gaza Strip, mostly women and children.
U.S. intelligence agencies have blamed the Iranian government for seeking to encourage protests in the U.S. over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.