Possible seabed position of crashed Lion jet found
JAKARTA, Indonesia — 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-milewide search area and chilling video of passengers boarding the fatal flight emerged.
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."
Separately, the head of the National Transportation Safety Committee, Soerjanto Tjahjono, said that search teams had detected pings believed to be from the aircraft's flight recorders, whose data is crucial to the accident investigation.
The disaster has reignited concerns about safety in Indonesia's fastgrowing aviation industry, which was recently removed from European Union and U.S. 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.
Navy officer Haris Djoko Nugroho said the 22-meter (72-foot) long object that could be part of the fuselage 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 flighttracking 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.
Several passengers on the Sunday flight from Bali to Jakarta have recounted problems that included a long-delayed takeoff for an engine check and terrifying descents in the first 10 minutes in the air.