Air crash investigators home in on black box

Indonesian investigators said they were homing in on the black box from a crashed jetliner after locating its “pings” yesterday, two days after the plane crashed shortly after take-off with 189 people on board. Retrieving the recording device will be crucial to unlocking why the Boeing 737-Max, one of the world’s newest and most advanced commercial passenger jets, nosedived into the Java Sea so soon after taking off from Jakarta. The authorities said they believed they were closing in on the main wreckage and had picked up the box’s signals about 30 to 40 metres below the surface off Indonesia’s north coast, where the plane crashed Monday. The black box contains flight data that shows the speed, altitude and direction of the plane, while the cockpit voice recorder keeps track of conversations and other sounds on the flight deck.