Indonesians find second black box

Indonesian authorities said on Monday they would start downloading the contents of a cockpit voice recorder from a Lion Air jet that crashed into the sea near Jakarta more than two months ago, killing all 189 people on board.

Indonesian authorities said on Monday they would at once start downloading contents of a cockpit voice recorder from a Lion Air jet that crashed into the sea near Jakarta more than two months ago, killing all 189 people on board. The crash was the first of a Boeing Co 737 MAX jet with the highest number of fatalities for 2018.

The recovery of the second black box from the Java Sea north of Jakarta on Monday may provide an account of the last actions of the jet’s pilots.

“We have our own laboratory and personnel to do it,” Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of the transportation safety committee, said. In the past it had taken up to three months to download, analyse and transcribe the contents of recorders, he said.

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

A preliminary report by Indonesia’s transport safety commission focused on airline maintenance and training, as well as the response of a Boeing antistall system and a recently replaced sensor, but did not give a cause for the crash.

A group of relatives of victims urged the transportation safety committee to reveal “everything that was recorded” and to work independently. A weak signal from the recorder was detected several days ago and it was found buried in soft mud on the sea floor in water about 30m deep.

“We don’t know what damage there is, but it has obvious scratches on it,” safety committee investigators said.

Pictures supplied by a transport agency official showed chipped bright orange paint on the cockpit recorder memory unit, but no major dents.

Investigators told reporters it should take no more than five days to download the data, but if there was a problem the cockpit voice recorder would be sent to the manufacturer.

With the recovery of the recorder, officials said there was no plan to continue searching for other parts of the wrecked plane, including an angle-ofattack sensor that was suspected to have been faulty.

Human remains had been found near the cockpit voice recorder, about 50m from where the flight data recorder, was found three days after the crash. Bureaucratic wrangling and funding problems hampered the initial search.

IN THE PAST IT HAD TAKEN UP TO THREE MONTHS TO DOWNLOAD, ANALYSE AND TRANSCRIBE THE CONTENTS OF RECORDERS