(Bloomberg) — The cockpit voice recorder on a medevac plane that crashed in Philadelphia earlier this year contained no data from the fatal flight and likely hadn’t been capturing audio “for several years,” the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report on Thursday.
The Learjet 55 operated by Jet Rescue Air Ambulance crashed on Jan. 31, killing all six people on board and one person on the ground while injuring several others.
It’s unclear why the plane’s cockpit voice recorder — a device commonly known as a “black box” — had not been operating, and the NTSB’s report offered no explanation for the lack of use. Data from cockpit voice recorders often provide critical clues about what transpired in the flight deck in the moments before an accident.
South Korean investigators probing why a Boeing Co. 737-800 jetliner operated by Jeju Air Co. crashed in late December similarly had no useful audio from that plane’s recorder. The device had stopped recording about four minutes before the plane barreled into a concrete structure at the end of a runway at the country’s Muan International Airport.
The mid-size business jet that crashed in Philadelphia was transporting a child, who had just received emergency medical treatment in the US, and her mother back home to Mexico. Four crew members were also aboard the aircraft.
The crash occurred less than 48 hours after 67 people were killed after a US military helicopter collided midair with an American Airlines Group Inc. regional jet near Washington.
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