Indonesia calls off search for Lion Air crash victims
Jarkata: Indonesia authorities said on Saturday (November 10) they had stopped the search for victims of a plane crash that killed all 189 people on board, but would keep looking for the Lion Air flight’s second black box, the cockpit voice recorder. About 196 bags containing body parts have been recovered from under the water with 79 victims identified and handed over to their families for burial. “Since yesterday afternoon until today we have not found any more victims and therefore I declare the search and rescue operation is over,” Muhammad Syaugi, head of the search and rescue agency, told reporters Saturday.
“We apologise to the public, especially the families of victims if during the operation we were not able to satisfy everybody,” he added.
Rescuers have also retrieved parts of the plane’s engines, wheels and seats from the sea. One diver died helping with search.
Lion Air has begun paying US$102,058 compensation money for each passenger to the grieving families.
The Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee has retrieved one of the black boxes - the flight data recorder - and is still hunting for the cockpit voice recorder, which recorded the last conversation between the pilot and co-pilot before the crash. Soearjanto Tjahjono, the head of the transportation safety committee (KNKT), said finding the voice recorder would be critical to understanding the cause of the crash.
“From the black box data, we know about 70-80 per cent of what happened but to 100 per cent understand the cause of the accident ... we need be able to know the conversation that took place in the plane’s cockpit,” he said, declining to elaborate on what the flight data recorder had revealed.