One of the two black boxes belonging to the Sriwijaya Air plane that crashed in the Java Sea with 62 people onboard has been retrieved by an Indonesian search party, a critical instrument for investigators investigating the cause of the crash.
As a team, including divers and a remotely operated underwater vehicle, the flight data recorder was found sweeping the seafloor in search of the black boxes that were on flight SJ 182 when it crashed three days ago shortly after takeoff.
Flight data recorders process information, including pressure, airspeed, and altitude, from a flight. The second black box, the voice recorder for the cockpit, has not been identified yet.
Indonesian National Armed Forces Commander Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto said the underwater acoustic beacons of the black boxes, which sent out a series of pings to help searchers locate them, were both detached. However, he was hopeful that the team would soon locate the second black box.
The head of the National Transport Safety Committee, Soerjanto Tjahjono, said that it would take two to five days for the authorities to read the data from the recovered black box.
“We are expecting that through this investigation we can unfold the mystery of this accident,” he said.
On Saturday afternoon, the Sriwijaya plane plunged into the waters northwest of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. The flight hit the Thousand Islands, a popular Indonesian tourist destination, and was bound for Pontianak, a city on the Indonesian side of the island of Borneo.
According to the global flight tracking service Flightradar24, four minutes into the flight, and in the midst of heavy rains, the plane plummeted 10,000 feet in less than a minute before vanishing from the radar. Navy divers discovered the wreckage of the plane on Sunday after detecting a signal from the plane’s fuselage.
Dozens of body bags were filled with human remains by a rescue team, and pieces of the plane and debris were retrieved from the site.
According to Flightradar24, the plane was a 26-year-old Boeing 737-500. The aircraft was in good shape before it took off, Sriwijaya Airlines CEO Jefferson Irwin Jauwena said.
The nation, with a population of 270 million people, relies heavily on air travel for commuting between islands around the archipelago, which ranges across more than 3,000 miles, about the same distance between London and New York. Indonesia has a weak aviation safety record and aircraft accidents are not uncommon.
In recent years, Indonesia has seen a boom in domestic aviation, with passenger traffic tripling between 2005 and 2017, according to the CAPA-Center for Aviation, an Australian consultancy.
A low-cost airline and the third-largest carrier in Indonesia, Sriwijaya Air carries more than 950,000 passengers per month from its Jakarta hub to 53 destinations within Indonesia and three regional countries.
Source: CNN