Crashed Indonesian plane's black box found

Asia World

Crashed Indonesian plane's black box found

"Data from the plane - the engine, all the instruments - are recorded there," said aviation analyst Dudi Sudibyo told AFP.

"If there is an anomaly, some technical problem, it is recorded there too."

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It could take up to three weeks to download data from the black boxes and up to six months to analyse it, Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of a national transport safety committee, said on Wednesday.

Officials show part of the ill-fated Lion Air flight JT 610's black box, a flight data recorder, after it was recovered from waters off Karawang, Nov 1, 2018. (Photo: AFP/Pradita Utama)

As part of the search operation, Indonesian authorities deployed divers, search and rescue vessels, four sonar detectors and an underwater acoustic beacon.

A "ping" sound believed to be emitted by one of the black boxes had been getting clearer, Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of the national transport safety panel, told Reuters earlier on Thursday.

An underwater drone had detected an object suspected to be part of the fuselage, he added.

A team of divers had gone down since 5am to map the area where the black box is thought to be, Haryo said, describing sea conditions as normal.

Strong currents on Tuesday hampered the search, with the effort further complicated by the presence of energy pipelines nearby.

However, officials had said they were confident they were searching in the right area, having found items, such as life jackets, trousers and magazines, thought to be from the plane.

If found, the fuselage would be lifted using a crane, because of the many bodies likely to be trapped inside, Muhammad Syaugi, the chief of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, said on Tuesday.

Members of a rescue team bring personal items and wreckage ashore at the port in Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta, after they were recovered from the sea where Lion Air flight JT 610 crashed off the north coast. (RESMI MALAU/AFP)

Flight JT610 sped up as it suddenly lost altitude in the minutes before it disappeared, according to flight data tracking websites, with authorities saying witnesses saw the Boeing 737 Max jet plunge into the water.

Indonesian officials named the captain of the flight as Bhavye Suneja, an Indian national who had been with the airline for seven years, local media reports said.

According to Lion Air, Suneja and his co-pilot, Harvino, had 11,000 hours of flying between them and had undergone medical checkups and drug testing recently.