Black boxes from South Korea plane crash failed to record final four minutes, officials say

The black boxes of a Boeing jetliner that crashed in South Korea last month stopped recording about four minutes before the accident, South Korean officials said Saturday, possibly complicating investigations into the cause of the disaster that killed 179 people.

After analyzing the devices, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders stopped working about four minutes before the crash, the South Korean Transportation Ministry said.

After initially analyzing the black boxes, South Korean officials sent the devices to the NTSB for closer examination after discovering that some of the data was missing. The transportation ministry said it wasn’t immediately clear why the devices failed to record data in the last four minutes.

“Data from the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) and FDR (flight data recorder) are crucial in investigating accidents, but such investigations are conducted through the examination and analysis of various sources of information, and we plan to do our utmost to determine the cause of the accident,” the ministry said in a statement.