SEOUL, South Korea –
Grieving relatives of South Korean plane crash victims gathered at the site to pay their respects to their loved ones on New Year’s Day, as officials said they extracted data from one of the recovered black boxes to find the cause. exact accident. .
All but two of the 181 passengers and crew aboard the Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air died when it crashed at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea on Sunday.
Video showed the plane without its landing gear deployed landing upside down at high speed and then skidding toward the end of the runway toward a concrete fence and bursting into flames. Footage showed the plane was experiencing an apparent engine problem in addition to landing gear malfunctions.
Investigators say the pilot received a warning from air traffic controllers about possible bird strikes and the plane issued a distress signal before the crash.
The Transport Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that it has completed work to extract data from the cockpit voice recorder, one of two black boxes recovered from the rubble. He said the data would be converted to audio files. A damaged flight data recorder will be sent to the United States for analysis, the ministry added.
All of the victims were South Korean except two Thais, and many returned from Bangkok after the Christmas holidays.
The grieving families visited the site on Wednesday for the first time since the accident for an emotional memorial service. They were taken by bus to the place where they took turns laying white flowers. Many knelt and bowed deeply before a memorial table covered with food, including “ddeokguk,” a Korean rice cake soup eaten on New Year’s Day.
The Transportation Ministry said authorities have completed the complicated process of identifying the 179 victims. He said that so far the government has handed over 11 bodies to their families.
The country is observing seven days of national mourning following the deadliest disaster in South Korea’s aviation history in decades.
The government has begun safety inspections of the 101 Boeing 737-800s operated by the country’s national airlines. On Tuesday, a team of American investigators, including representatives from Boeing, examined the crash site.
Officials have said they will consider whether the airport’s localizer – a set of antennas housed in a concrete fence at the end of the runway designed to guide planes during landings – should have been built with lighter materials that would break more easily. in case of impact.
