Hundreds of grieving relatives of people killed in the fated Jeju Air plane crash visited the site on New Year’s Day to pay respect to their loved ones.
South Korea’s transport ministry said authorities have finished formally identifying the 179 victims of the country’s worst air disaster.
Investigators have also extracted the data from the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder and will convert it into an audio file, which is hoped will provide an insight into the crucial moments leading up to the tragedy.
The conversion could take about two days, the ministry said.
Officials said the contents of the damaged flight data recorder was not able to be extracted in South Korea, so it will be sent to the United States in cooperation with the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for analysis.
All 175 passengers and four of six crew members were killed on Sunday when the Boeing 737-800 belly-landed at Muan International Airport in the country’s southwest and slammed into a sand and concrete embankment at the end of the runway, where it burst into flames.
Two crew members, located near the tail of the plane, survived.
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The government has declared a national mourning period until 4 January and the country scaled back New Year’s celebrations.
The transport ministry said two more US officials arrived late on Tuesday to join a team of around two dozen investigators including from the NTSB, Federal Aviation Administration, and aircraft maker Boeing.
“They’re also planning to start a visual investigation into the wreckage,” deputy minister for civil aviation Joo Jong-wan told a briefing.
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Many questions remain unanswered and investigators will examine whether a bird strike, a failure of the landing gear to drop, or if problems with any other control systems played a role in the disaster.
Air safety experts have also questioned if the airport embankment designed to prop up navigation equipment was built too close to the end of the runway.
South Korea’s acting President Choi Sang-mok has called for a fair and objective investigation, adding: “The most urgent matter at present is to return the victims to their families.”
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Airport authorities set up an altar late on Tuesday, and on Wednesday buses carried relatives of victims to the crash site so they could pay their respects to their lost loved ones.
Park Han-shin, who has been liaising with airport and government authorities on behalf of the bereaved families, said almost 700 family members visited the crash site, where they laid chrysanthemums and bowls of rice cake soup.
County officials have since sent an alert to urge visitors to go instead to a larger memorial set up in a sports complex about five miles from the crash site.
