Jeju Air Flight Recorder Stopped Working 4 Minutes Before Plane Crash

The flight recorder of the Jeju Air passenger jet that crashed last month, killing ​179 people, stopped recording for​ its last four minutes, South Korean officials said on Saturday, a significant setback for investigators.

Data extracted from the so-called black box, consisting of the ​cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, is generally crucial in investigations of aviation accidents. Officials in South Korea, who have been working with the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board​, have said that the ​flight data for the plane’s last four minutes​ would be ​especially important in this crash.​

But on Saturday, South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that for reasons ​not yet determined, the black box of the Boeing 737-800 had stopped recording then.

“We plan to investigate why the data was not recorded,” the ministry said in a news release. ​It also said that other data and analysis would be used to try to understand what happened in last month’s disaster.

Jeju Air Flight 7C2216​, coming from Bangkok with 181 people on board, was preparing to land at Muan International Airport in southwestern South Korea at 8:59 a.m. on Dec. 29 when ​its pilot reported, “Mayday, mayday, mayday,” and, “Bird strike, bird strike,” according to officials. The pilot also told the air traffic control tower that he was “going around,” meaning he would abort his first landing attempt and circle in the air to prepare for a second one.

But he apparently did not have enough time to make a full circle. Instead, the plane approached the runway from the opposite direction and landed on its belly, without its landing gear deployed. Seeming unable to control its speed, it overshot the runway. Four