Relatives’ anguish
Search continues for bodies and black box from doomed flight
DIVERS are scouring the waters in the Java Sea off Jakarta in a bid to find the allimportant black box and flight recorder from the downed Lion Air plane which plummeted at frighteningly high speed into the sea this week.
They are also working around the clock in a bid to find the bodies of the 189 passengers and crew.
The continued search comes as anguished families of those who perished gathered at command posts in Jakarta, providing DNA samples to help identify the human remains found so far.
There are stories of heartbreak and loss and the miraculous survival of Sony Setiawan, who missed the flight because he was stuck in traffic. His 20 Finance Ministry colleagues all perished.
The speed of the plane’s catastrophic nosedive – calculated by FlightRadar24 data at more than 500km per hour when it plunged into the ocean – means the plane broke apart, leaving no chance of survivors.
It comes as maintenance records and a defect log for the brand new Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, obtained by the BBC, reveal the previous evening it had allegedly suffered airspeed and altitude instrument issues on a routine flight from Denpasar to Jakarta.
Lion Air’s chief executive, Edward Sirait, has said the plane had a “technical issue” on the previous flight but that this had been resolved. The plane involved was new. It had flown only 800 hours, was manufactured this year, had its first flight on July 30 and was brought into Lion Air’s fleet in mid-August.
Flight JT610 took off from Jakarta airport at 6.20am on Monday for a scheduled onehour flight to Pangkal Pinang in the Bangka-Belitung Islands east of Sumatra.
But just minutes into the flight, at which the altitude readings were said to be erratic, the pilot or co-pilot requested to come back to Jakarta.
Minutes later the plane disappeared from radar and soon after debris was found floating on the ocean, just 25 nautical miles from Jakarta’s main port.