Possible seabed position of crashed Lion Air jet located
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A massive search effort has identified the possible seabed location of the crashed Lion Air jet, Indonesia’s military chief said Wednesday, as experts carried out the grim task of identifying dozens of body parts recovered from a 15-nautical-mile-wide search area.
The 2-month-old Boeing plane plunged into the Java Sea on Monday just minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.
“This morning I’ve been briefed by the head of Search and Rescue Agency about the strong possibility of the location coordinates” of Flight 610, said armed forces chief Hadi Tjahjanto. “We’re going to see it ourselves on location. And hopefully that is the main body of the plane that we’ve been looking for.”
The disaster has reignited concerns about safety in Indonesia’s fast-growing aviation industry, which was recently removed from European Union and US blacklists, and also raised doubts about the safety of Boeing’s new generation 737 MAX 8 plane.
Boeing Co. experts are expected to arrive in Indonesia on Wednesday and Lion Air has said an “intense” internal investigation is underway in addition to the probe by safety regulators.
Locating the fuselage will bring the search effort closer to finding the airplane’s flight recorders, which are crucial to the accident investigation.
Navy officer Haris Djoko Nugroho, interviewed by Indonesian television at the search location, said the 22-meter (72-foot) long object is at a depth of 32 meters (105 feet).
He said divers will be deployed after side-scan sonar has produced more detailed images. He said it was first located on Tuesday evening.
“There are some small objects that we found, but last night, thank God, we found a large enough object,” he said.
Data from flight-tracking sites show the plane had erratic speed and altitude in the early minutes of a flight on Sunday and on its fatal flight Monday. Safety experts caution, however, that the data must be checked for accuracy against the plane’s black boxes, which officials are confident will be recovered.