JAKARTA – Indonesian navy divers on Monday retrieved the black box flight data recorder from the wreckage of an AirAsia airliner that crashed two weeks ago, killing all 162 people on board.[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″]
The Head of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, Fransiskus Soelistyo, who disclosed this in[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″] Jakarta, said “at 7.11 a.m., we succeeded in lifting the part of the[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″] black box known as the flight data recorder.”
The flight QZ8501, which crashed on Dec. 28, 2014, lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”8″].
Soelistyo said that the second black box with the cockpit voice recorder had been located, based on pings from its emergency transmitter, but had not been retrieved.
Government officials hoped that the black boxes, found near the wrecked wing of the plane, would reveal the cause of the crash.
The recorders were expected to be taken to the capital, Jakarta, for analysis and it could take up to a month to get a complete reading of the data.
Over the weekend, three vessels detected “pings” that were believed to be from the black boxes, but strong winds, powerful currents and high waves hampered search efforts.
But, dozens of Indonesian navy divers took advantage of calmer weather in the Java Sea on Monday to retrieve the flight recorder and search for the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200.
So far, 48 bodies of the 162 people onboard had been recovered from the Java Sea by searchers through a multinational operation, and 27 had been identified by the Indonesian police’s disaster victims’ identification unit.
However, searchers believe more will be found in the plane’s fuselage.
“All the ships, including the ships from our friends, will be deployed with the main task of searching for bodies that are still or suspected to still be trapped underwater,” Soelistyo said.
Indonesia AirAsia, 49 per cent owned by the Malaysia-based AirAsia budget group, had come under pressure from authorities in Jakarta since the crash.
President Joko Widodo had said that the crash exposed widespread problems in the management of air travel in Indonesia. (Reuters/NAN)