Crash jet ‘black box’ found
LONG WAIT: FLIGHT RECORDER DATA MAY TAKE SIX MONTHS TO ANALYSE
Government suspends four of the airline’s managers.
Jakarta
Indonesian divers yesterday retrieved a “black box” from a Lion Air passenger jet that crashed into the shallow sea off the coast of capital Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.
The device should provide clues to what went wrong after the plane lost contact with ground staff just 13 minutes after taking off on Monday from Jakarta on its way to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang.
“We dug and we got the black box,” a diver, identified as Hendra, told broadcaster Metro TV on board search vessel Baruna Jaya, describing how his team found the orange-coloured box intact in debris on the muddy sea floor.
The diver said he had seen only “small pieces” of the aircraft and the search had closed in on the black box because of the “ping” signals it emitted.
The device, identified as the flight data recorder, would be handed over to Indonesia’s transportation safety committee (KNKT), authorities said.
The plane’s black boxes should help explain why the almost-new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet went down.
It could take up to three weeks to download data from the black boxes and up to six months to analyse it, the head of a national transport safety committee (KNKT), Soerjanto Tjahjono, said.
Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of the national transport safety panel, earlier said an underwater drone had detected an object suspected to be part of the fuselage not far from the crash site.
With media speculating on the airworthiness of the aircraft, the transport ministry suspended for 120 days Lion Air’s maintenance and engineering director, fleet maintenance manager and the release engineer who gave the jet permission to fly on Monday.
Lion Air will also be subject to more intensive “on ramp” inspections compared with other airlines. Regulators will check 40% of its flights at random, compared with 10% to 15% for other airlines, Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said.
President Joko Widodo ordered a review of all regulations relating to flight safety, he said.
The government was also considering reviewing airfares and may increase ticket prices charged by low-cost carriers, he said, without providing details.
Investigators are looking into why the pilot asked to return to base shortly after take-off, a request ground control officials granted, although the flight crashed soon after. – Reuters