The Government of South Korea has announced that it will send one of the two black boxes from the crashed plane in the southwest of the country to the United States on Sunday for decoding due to the damage the device suffered after the accident. “We have decided that extracting the data from the damaged flight data recorder here is not possible,” the director of aviation policy at the South Korean Ministry of Transportation, Joo Jong-wan, explained at a press conference.
“So we have agreed with the NTSB (the acronym in English for the US National Transportation Safety Board) to send it to the United States and analyze it there,” he added.
The exact date on which the device will be sent to the US, the processing of which will take months and whose analysis will also involve South Korean researchers, has not yet been decided.
The announcement comes on the same day that it was reported that data has been successfully extracted from the other black box, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), and that it is now converting it into sound files.
On Sunday, flight 7C2216, a Boeing 737-800 of the South Korean low-cost airline Jeju Air, exploded after hitting the runway without the landing gear deployed and crashing into an off-runway wall at Muan airport. The accident killed 179 occupants and only two survivors, making it the worst civil aviation accident ever to occur on South Korean soil and the worst in all of 2024 globally.
Accident full of unknowns
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 the impact of a bird that caused the tragedy. Experts believe it is unlikely that a bird strike was the only cause of what happened.
Minutes before touching down, the control tower issued an alert due to the proximity of birds to the aircraft, and shortly afterward 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.
That structure housed an Instrumental Landing System (ILS) antenna, essential for the pilot to horizontally align the plane with the runway before landing the device, and yesterday focused the investigations on the ground. It is believed that the impact against the structure was a determining reason why the mortality rate of the accident was so high.
In total, five NTSB members and four other representatives of the manufacturer Boeing have joined 11 officials from the South Korean Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board to analyze the event on the ground.
The rules of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) establish that the country where the accident occurs must initiate the investigation and that countries with actors involved, such as the aircraft operator and the aircraft manufacturer, have the right to participate in the investigations, as well as those nations with victims in the incident.
Source: www.eldiario.es
