South Korea says raw data was extracted from Jeju Air’s cockpit recorder Aviation news

All 179 victims of the deadliest plane crash on South Korean soil have been identified, officials said.

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

Jo Jung-wan, vice minister of civil aviation, said on Wednesday that the “preliminary extraction” of data from the cockpit voice recorder had been completed.

“Based on this initial data, we plan to start converting it to audio format,” Gu said.

Gu said the plane’s second black box, the flight data recorder, will be sent to the United States for analysis as local investigators were unable to recover the information it contained due to damage sustained in the accident.

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

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

Aviation experts have raised a series of possible causes and contributing factors to Sunday’s disaster, including bird collisions, mechanical failure, pilot error and the presence of a hardened embankment less than 300 meters from the end of the runway.

The Boeing 737-800 touched down on the runway, without its landing gear deployed, shortly after the pilot reported that a bird had struck the air traffic control tower, then slid onto a concrete embankment and burst into flames.

South Korean authorities, aided by investigators from Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, focused their initial investigation on the dam, which some aviation experts said should have been placed farther from the runway or built of softer materials.

South Korean officials also announced on Wednesday 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 said identifying the remains was a slow and difficult process due to damage to the bodies in the accident.