South Korea says initial data extracted from Jeju Air cockpit recorder 

Investigators probing the deadly crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 in South Korea have recovered the initial data from one of the aircraft’s black boxes, officials have said.

Joo Jong-wan, deputy minister for civil aviation, said on Wednesday that the “initial extraction” of data from the cockpit voice recorder had been completed.

“Based on this preliminary data, we plan to start converting it into audio format,” Joo said.

Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed at Muan International Airport, about 290km southwest of Seoul, on Sunday morning, killing 179 of 181 people on board.

The crash was the worst-ever air disaster on South Korean soil and the deadliest accident involving a South Korean airline since a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed into a Guam hillside in 1997, killing 228 people.

Aviation experts have raised a series of possible causes and contributing factors in Sunday’s disaster, including a collision with birds, mechanical failure, pilot error and the presence of a hardened embankment less than 300 metres from the end of the runway.

The Boeing 737-800 belly-landed on the runway, without its landing gear deployed, shortly after the pilot reported a bird strike to air traffic control, then skidded into a concrete embankment and exploded into flames.

South Korean authorities, aided by investigators from Boeing and the United States National Transportation Safety Board, have focused their initial inquiries on the embankment, which some aviation experts have said should have been placed further from the runaway or constructed from softer materials.

South Korean officials on Wednesday also announced that they had confirmed the identities of all 179 victims amid complaints from grieving families about the timeframe for identifying and releasing the bodies.

Authorities have said that identifying the remains has been a slow and difficult process due to the damage done to the bodies in the crash.