Cockpit Voice Recorder Recovered but Part of Flight Data Recorder Lost
On the 29th, a Jeju Air passenger plane carrying 181 passengers collided with the outer wall of the runway while landing at Muan International Airport, causing a fire that resulted in a major disaster with most passengers dead. Firefighters are searching for missing persons among the wreckage of the accident aircraft on the runway at Muan International Airport, Jeonnam. Photo by Kang Jin-hyung
The black box decoding work, which is the key to determining the cause of the Jeju Air passenger plane disaster that occurred at 9:03 a.m. on the 29th, is expected to take more than a month.
According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Aviation and Railway Accident Investigation Board (ARAIB), the flight data recorder (FDR) of Jeju Air flight 7C2216 was recovered with some external damage.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport stated that among the two black boxes of the accident aircraft, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was fully recovered, but the FDR has not been fully recovered yet and is still being searched as of 8:30 p.m.
Gwak Young-pil, a manager of the Central Accident Response Headquarters situation team, said, "Both the FDR and CVR must be 100% secured to be transferred to the Accident Investigation Board for analysis, but currently some parts of the flight recorders that were detached due to impact have not been found, so the search is ongoing."
The FDR and CVR are the "black boxes" of an aircraft that play a crucial role in determining the cause of an aviation accident. Manager Gwak explained, "In the past, they were called black boxes because of their black exterior, but now they are composed of orange boxes."
If both devices are completely recovered, the decoding work is known to be possible within a week. However, if the recovery of the FDR is delayed, it is inevitable that the overall investigation work will also be delayed. Aviation accident investigations can take from several months to several years. In particular, the decoding work of the FDR and CVR determines the direction and duration of the entire investigation.
If the damage to the FDR is severe, the investigation may have to be entrusted to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). In such cases, the black box decoding work alone may take more than six months. The FDR and CVR are mostly installed in the tail section of the aircraft to minimize impact during a crash.
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