South Korea Jeju Air jet black boxes stopped recording four minutes before crash

Jeju Air jet’s ‘black box’ stopped recording just minutes before the airliner hit a concrete structure at South Korea's Muan airport on December 29, the transport ministry said on Saturday. Without the black box data, the flight information and cockpit voice recorders are missing.

According to Reuters, authorities investigating the disaster that claimed 179 lives, the deadliest on South Korean soil, plan to examine the cause of the "black boxes" stopping their recording, according to a statement from the ministry. At first, they examined the voice recorder in South Korea discovered the data was missing and sent it to the US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory. The damaged flight data recorder was taken to the United States for analysis in cooperation with the US safety regulator.

Jeju Air 7C2216 exploded into flames after it overshot the airport's runway following a belly-landing and hitting an embankment. The plane had departed Thailand's capital of Bangkok for Muan in southwestern South Korea.