Black boxes of the Jeju Air flight 7C2216 that crashed in South Korea, stopped recording four minutes prior to the crash.
The Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder of Jeju Air flight 7C2216 stopped recording four minutes before the aircraft crashed at Muan Airport, according to a press release from the Korean investigation board ARAIB.
Yonhap News Agency confirmed that the black boxes had stopped transmitting at 08:59 am local time.
It was the same time that the Boeing aircraft had suffered a bird strike to the right engine, which may have cut off power to the entire aircraft.
The explosion occurred at 9:03 a.m. on Dec. 29, when the Jeju Air flight struck a concrete mound housing localizer equipment at the end of Muan International Airport after skidding without its landing gear open.
Damaged data recorder of the aircraft has been deemed irrecoverable for data extraction at the domestic level. The black box components were sent to the NTSB in Washington last week.
The Boeing 737 Next Generation was engineered antecedent to the Federal Aviation Administration’s stipulation for battery backups on the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder.
If the engines stop and no APU running then the data recorders stop, there is no cover-up.