By Hyunjoo Jin and Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) – The flight data and cockpit voice recorders on the Jeju Air jet that crashed on December 29 stopped recording about four minutes before the plane crashed into a concrete structure at South Korea’s Moan airport. The Transport Ministry said on Saturday.

Authorities are investigating the disaster, which killed 179 people, the deadliest on South Korean soil, the ministry said in a statement. was bad, intends to analyze what caused the “black boxes” to stop recording.

The ministry said the voice recorder was initially analyzed in South Korea, and when data was found to be missing, it was sent to a US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory.

The damaged flight data recorder was flown to the US for analysis in cooperation with the US safety regulator, the ministry said.

Jeju Air 7C2216, which had taken off from the Thai capital of Bangkok to Muan in southwestern South Korea, overshot the regional airport’s runway after belly-landing, bursting into flames after hitting an embankment.

The pilots told air traffic control that the plane hit the birds and declared an emergency about four minutes before it crashed down the embankment, bursting into flames. Two injured crew members sitting in the tail section were rescued.

Two minutes before the May Day emergency call, air traffic control alerted for “bird activity.” Declaring an emergency, the pilots abandoned the landing attempt and began a go-around.

But instead of going full throttle, the budget airline’s Boeing (NYSE: ) 737-800 jet made a sharp turn and approached the airport’s single runway from the opposite end, crash landing without landing gear.

Sim Jae-dong, a former accident investigator at the Ministry of Transport, said the discovery of the missing data from crucial last minutes was surprising and indicated that all power, including backup, had been cut, which is rare. .

The Transport Ministry said other available data will be used in the investigation and will ensure that investigations are transparent and that this information will be shared with the families of the victims.

Some family members of the victims have said that the Transport Ministry should not lead the investigation but instead involve independent experts recommended by the families.

The crash investigation has also focused on the embankment, which was designed to support the “localizer” system used to assist the aircraft in landing, including the fact that it was so hard material. Why was it built and so close to the runway?