Research vessel finds suspected location of crashed airliner's second black box
Published on: Saturday, January 16, 2021
By: Agencies
The Baruna Jaya IV research vessel deployed a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to locate the cockpit voice recorder of the ill-fated flight.
JAKARTA: Research vessel Baruna Jaya has detected the suspected location of the crashed Sriwijaya Air flight SJ-182’s cockpit voice recorder (CVR), officials informed on Thursday.Chief of the Agency for Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), Hammam Riza, said the agency’s Baruna Jaya IV is still at the crash site and is continuing to search for the CVR, which is part of the black box flight recorder.
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“The search for the CVR is still ongoing using an undersea robot which is commonly called Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV),” he said in a press statement released on Thursday.
The ROV is equipped with Ultra Short Baseline (USBL), capable of determining the coordinate position so that the location of any item on the seabed can be determined, he informed.
During the search operation in which the RCV was deployed over a 53-metre radius, 34 locations of plane debris have been found, with the farthest debris found at a distance of 53 metres from the point where the flight data recorder was retrieved, he said.
The plane’s flight data recorder (FDR) was retrieved by Navy divers from the seabed around 4:30pm local time on Tuesday. It was found lying about 23 metres below the water surface.
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The FDR device of the aircraft, which was carrying 50 passengers and 12 crew members on board when it crashed into the ocean on January 9, has been handed over to the National Committee for Transportation Safety (KNKT).
The Transportation Ministry had earlier confirmed that airport authorities had lost contact with the Sriwijaya Air flight, serving the Jakarta-Pontianak route, around 2:40pm local time on Saturday (January 9).
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According to the ministry, the last contact with the Boeing 737-500 jet, bearing the registration number PK-CLC, was made at 11 nautical miles north of Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, after the aircraft crossed an altitude of 11 thousand feet and was ascending to 13 thousand feet.
The plane took off from Soekarno-Hatta Airport at 2:40pm local time on Saturday and was scheduled to land at Supadio Airport in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, at 3:50pm local time.
Meanwhile, Indonesian investigators have successfully recovered data from a crashed passenger jet’s flight recorder, days after the plane with 62 people aboard slammed into the sea, they said Friday.
“(It’s) all in good condition and we’re now examining the data,” National Transportation Safety Committee head Soerjanto Tjahjono said in a statement.
The recorder, which holds information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane, could supply critical clues as to why the aircraft plunged about 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) in less than a minute before crashing into waters off Jakarta on Saturday.
A rescue party near the capital’s coast has worked for days to salvage human remains and wreckage from the Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737-500, as well as two flight recorders.
More than 3,000 people are taking part in the recovery effort, assisted by dozens of boats and helicopters.
Divers on Tuesday hauled the data recorder to the surface, with the hunt now focused on finding a cockpit voice recorder on the wreckage-littered seabed.
The crash probe was likely to take months, but a preliminary report was expected in 30 days.
Indonesia’s fast-growing aviation sector has long been plagued by safety concerns, and its airlines were once banned from US and European airspace.
In October 2018, 189 people were killed when a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX jet crashed near Jakarta.Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
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