Key Takeaways:

• Bird feathers and blood discovered in both engines of the crashed Jeju Air jet.
• The plane's emergency was declared just before the fatal belly landing.
• The investigation faces challenges due to missing black box data.
• Only two crew members survived the disaster, marking it as South Korea's worst aviation tragedy.

Seoul, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Amid ongoing investigations into the Jeju Air crash that resulted in the deaths of 179 individuals, investigators have reported finding both bird feathers and blood in the engines of the Boeing 737-800. This airplane had embarked from Bangkok, Thailand, to Muan County in South Korea, but tragically belly-landed and overshot the regional airport's runway, igniting upon hitting an embankment.

It was noted that just prior to the accident, one of the pilots had reported a bird strike and declared an emergency about four minutes before impact. Additionally, air traffic control had warned of "bird activity" in the vicinity only two minutes earlier.

According to authorities, investigators have corroborated the presence of feathers in one of the engines retrieved from the scene, and video footage supports the occurrence of a bird strike. The South Korean transport ministry, however, declined to confirm these findings explicitly.

The black boxes from the plane, critical for deciphering the crash's cause, ceased recording approximately four minutes before the incident, complicating the investigation process. Former transport ministry accident investigator Sim Jai-dong remarked on the rarity of such missing data, suggesting a potential loss of power that is atypical in aviation incidents.

Bird strikes impacting both engines, while rare, have been managed successfully in some cases, such as the well-known Miracle on the Hudson incident in 2009.