Indonesian divers earlier today retrieved the flight data recorder of the AirAsia plane that went down in the Java Sea a fortnight ago with 162 people on board, a crucial breakthrough that should help explain what caused the crash.
The recorder, one of two black boxes containing vital information, was brought to the surface at 7:11 am, said national search and rescue chief Bambang Soelistyo, after a lengthy, frustrating search often hampered by bad weather.
“We succeeded in bringing up part of the black box that we call the flight data recorder,” Soelistyo told reporters in the capital Jakarta.
He said that it was found under the wreckage of a wing and added that divers were still hunting for the second black box, the cockpit voice recorder.
National Transport Safety Committee senior investigator Mardjono Siswosuwarno told the media that the black boxes would be sent to Jakarta and analysed at the committee’s laboratory.
Flight QZ8501 crashed on December 28 en route from Indonesia’s Surabaya to Singapore. Indonesia’s meteorological agency has said that stormy weather likely caused the Airbus A320-200 to go down but a definitive answer is impossible without the data recorders.
Forty-eight bodies have been recovered so far, but the weather has hampered efforts to locate all the victims and the wreckage.
Yesterday, Indonesia’s transport ministry said the black boxes had been located under the plane’s wreckage after officials earlier said strong ping signals had been detected near an object believed to be the main body of the plane.
S.B. Supriyadi, a director with the national search and rescue agency, said that initial analysis of the wreckage so far recovered indicated that the plane exploded on impact with the water.
“It exploded because of the pressure,” he told reporters in Pangkalan Bun town on Borneo island, the search headquarters.
The tail of the plane, with its red AirAsia logo, was lifted out of the water on Saturday using giant balloons and a crane.
While the cause of the crash is unknown, the disaster has once again placed Indonesia’s chaotic aviation industry under scrutiny.
