Lion Air black box found buried in mud

INDONESIAN authorities has found the cockpit voice recorder from a Lion Air plane more than two months after the Boeing Co 737 MAX jet crashed into the sea near Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.

Naval Lieutenant Colonel Agung Nugroho said a weak signal from the recorder had been detected for several days before it was found buried beneath 8m of mud in waters 30m deep.

“We don’t know what damage there is, it has obvious scratches on it,” Nugroho said.

Contact with flight JT610 was lost 13 minutes after it took off on October 29 from the capital, Jakarta, heading north to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang.

The crash was the first involving a Boeing 737 MAX jet and was the world’s deadliest aviation disaster of 2018.

The cockpit voice recorder is one of the two so-called black boxes crucial for the investigation of a plane crash. The other black box, the flight data recorder, was recovered three days after the crash.