JAKARTA – The cockpit voice recorder from a crashed Indonesian passenger jet has been found, said the Transport Ministry today, more than two months after the accident that killed all 62 passengers and crew.
Officials said a press briefing “regarding the discovery of the cockpit voice recorder” from the Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737-500 will be held later today.
The 26-year-old plane – previously flown by the United States-based Continental Airlines and United Airlines – plunged around 3,000m into the waters off the city here just minutes after take-off on January 9.
Divers had been searching the Java Sea for the voice recorder – one of the plane’s two “black boxes” – which records flight crew conversations.
A flight data recorder was earlier plucked from the wreckage-littered seabed.
A preliminary report into the crash last month said Indonesian pilots had reported multiple problems with the ageing jet’s throttle system before the fatal accident.
But, investigators have said it is too early to pinpoint an exact cause.
The cockpit voice recorder may provide vital clues as to what the desperate crew members were saying when the flight from here to Pontianak in Borneo went down.
Indonesia, a Southeast Asian archipelago that relies heavily on air transport to connect its thousands of islands, has suffered a string of deadly plane crashes in recent years.
In October 2018, 189 people were killed when a Boeing 737 MAX jet belonging to Lion Air plunged into the sea.
That crash – and another in Ethiopia – led to the worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX over a faulty anti-stall system.
The 737 that crashed last month was not a MAX variant. – AFP, March 31, 2021
