Searchers locate recorders in crashed Indonesia plane site
By People Daily, January 11, 2021Jakarta, Sunday
Black boxes of a passenger plane which crashed in the sea soon after take-off from Jakarta, Indonesia on Saturday have been located, officials say.
A small flotilla of ships has been searching the site and navy divers should soon be able to retrieve the two flight recorders, they add. Aircraft parts and human remains have been found.
The Sriwijaya Air Boeing 737 was carrying 62 people when it vanished from radar on its journey to Borneo.
“We have located the position of the black boxes, both of them,” said Soerjanto Tjahjono, head of Indonesia’s transport safety committee, quoted by AFP.
“Divers will start looking for them now and hopefully it won’t be long before we get them.”
Investigators are analysing items which they believe to be a wheel and part of the plane’s fuselage.
Relatively shallow
BBC South-East Asia correspondent Jonathan Head says the sea in this part of Indonesia is relatively shallow and the bad weather which had been hampering rescue operations has now improved, making it more likely significant parts can be recovered.
However, the search appears to offer no hope of finding any survivors.
Human remains and plane wreckage have been pulled from the crash site of an Indonesian passenger jet that plunged into the ocean minutes after takeoff on Saturday, with 62 people on board.
The Sriwijaya Air flight 182 — a Boeing 737-500 — was heading from Jakarta to the city of Pontianak, on the Indonesian side of Borneo, when it lost contact at 2:40 p.m. local time (2:40 a.m. ET), 11 nautical miles north of Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.
Four minutes into the flight, and amid heavy rains, the plane dropped 10,000 feet in less than a minute before disappearing from the radar, according to the global flight tracking service Flightradar24.
Five body bags containing victims of the crash located by the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) have so far been handed over to the disaster victim investigation unit in Jakarta for identification, according to mission coordinator Rasman MS.
Ten bags filled with wreckage and debris from the aircraft have now been handed to Jakarta-based air crash investigators, he said.
Indonesian Navy divers on Sunday found wreckage from flight SJY 182 after locating a signal from the aircraft’s fuselage.
Commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces, Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto, said that he is confident that the Navy Rigel Warship has located the plane’s fuselage.
A command post set up at the Kramat Jati Police Hospital in Jakarta to identify the crash victims and search for family members was working to identify the remains, Tjahjanto said.
Search team deployed
The focus of the search is between the islands of Laki and Lancang, known as the Thousand Islands chain, about 20 miles northwest of Jakarta.
Some 28 ships, five helicopters and two airplanes have been deployed in a joint effort between the Indonesian Navy, Police, Coast Guard and Transportation Ministry.
Navy official Abdul Rasyid said the Indonesian Navy has dispatched 10 ships to the surrounding waters off Laki Island and the Armed Forces chief will visit the search area Sunday morning. – Agencies