JAKARTA – Grieving friends and relatives are expected at a cemetery here today for the funeral of a flight attendant on the crashed Indonesian passenger jet, as divers restarted their hunt for its second black box.
Okky Bisma, 29, was the first confirmed victim of Saturday’s disaster after fingerprints from his retrieved hand matched those on a government identity database.
There were 62 crew members and passengers, including 10 children, on the Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737-500, which plunged about 3,000m in less than a minute before slamming into the Java Sea just after take-off from Jakarta.
At least five other victims have since been identified, as forensic examiners sort through mangled human remains retrieved from the wreckage-littered seabed in the hope of matching DNA with relatives.
Funeral traditions in Indonesia, the world’s biggest Muslim-majority nation, call for a quick burial of the dead.
But the identification process could take weeks or more, prolonging the agony for some distraught families.
Nearly 270 divers were on hand today, as authorities restarted the underwater hunt, which was called off a day earlier due to bad weather and rough seas.
“The main focus (today) will be the diving,” said Rasman MS, the search-and-rescue agency’s operations director.
“We’re not just looking for one thing – victims, the cockpit voice recorder and debris are all priorities.”
Investigators said they are working to read critical details on a flight data device that had already been salvaged, with the focus now on finding the plane’s cockpit voice recorder.
According to aviation experts, black box data includes the speed, altitude and direction of the plane, as well as flight crew conversations, and helps explain nearly 90% of all crashes.
So far, authorities have been unable to explain why the 26-year-old plane – bound for Pontianak city on Borneo island, a 90-minute flight away – crashed just four minutes after take-off.
Authorities said it had experienced pilots at the controls, and preliminary evidence showed that the crew members did not declare an emergency or report technical problems as it sharply deviated from its planned course just before the crash.
Aviation analysts said bad weather, pilot error, poor maintenance and mechanical failure were among possible factors.
As the global pandemic hammered demand for air travel, the jet – previously flown by United States-based Continental Airlines and United Airlines – had been parked in a hangar for about nine months, before it was put back into service in December after being declared airworthy by the Transport Ministry.
Since then, flight tracking data shows that it had flown more than 130 times before the accident.
The crash probe was likely to take months, but a preliminary report is expected in 30 days. – AFP, January 14, 2021
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