Indonesia stepped up a hunt for the black box of a crashed Boeing Co. jet after four days of scouring the sea only yielded a damaged flight data recorder, prolonging the mystery on what could have downed the Lion Air plane.
The shattering of the device, which is built to withstand high-impact crashes, shows how violently the 737 Max jet plunged and broke into pieces. An expert team from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and General Electric Co., the maker of aircraft engines, is assisting in the investigation, according to the Indonesian government.
The National Search and Rescue Agency may be close to finding the plane’s main wreckage and the cockpit voice recorder, its chief M. Syaugi told reporters. Though the depth in the area of the crash is only about 35 meters, strong currents and waves are making searches difficult, he said.
The flight data and cockpit voice recorders—both of which are often referred to as black boxes—hold information on a plane’s electronics, systems and store the conversation of pilots and help aid accident investigations.
Searching Clues
More than four days after Lion Air flight JT610 carrying 189 people plunged into the sea, Indonesian search crews have fished out little else than small pieces of the aircraft, body parts of victims and personal belongings. The hunt for clues has evoked images of the years-long and as yet unsuccessful search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014.
While it may take days or weeks before definitive information emerges on the crash, Lion Air has said the aircraft had experienced problems with sensors used to calculate height and speed in its previous flight. The issue was checked by maintenance workers overnight before the plane was cleared for the ill-fated flight, the airline said.
The transport safety committee said on Friday it interviewed the crew of the flight that operated the aircraft from Bali to Jakarta the day before the crash and was also gathering data from a military radar outside the national capital, it said.
Widening Search
Divers are scouring a 270 square-mile area under the Java Sea to recover the remains of the plane that plummeted into the shallow waters off Jakarta. They found part of the plane’s landing gear and more aircraft parts on Friday.
“Now we are finding bigger parts as opposed to only small debris yesterday,” Syaugi said. “Now, we are searching at the right spot,” he said adding that the agency plans to sweep a wider area from Saturday.
The nation’s transport ministry said it will step up checks on aircraft and ground planes with technical snags that can’t be solved. On Thursday, the ministry ordered the suspension of Lion Air managers in charge of quality control, fleet maintenance and an engineer who cleared flight JT610.
The government has vowed “strict sanctions” on Lion Air if a probe by the safety board proves negligence on the part of the airline, the ministry said on Oct. 31.
The tragedy has raised questions about the safety record of a country whose airlines were for years judged too dangerous to fly over Europe. Lion Air was among Indonesian airlines that were banned by the EU from 2007 through 2016, according to the Aviation Safety Network database maintained by the Flight Safety Foundation.
The nation’s domestic airline market has boomed in recent years to become the fifth largest in the world. Local airline traffic more than tripled between 2005 and 2017 to 97 million people, according to the CAPA Center for Aviation, and is dominated by flag carrier PT Garuda Indonesia and Lion Air Group.
Carriers have struggled with safety issues partly as a result of the pace of that expansion, as well as issues intrinsic to a region of mountainous terrain, equatorial thunderstorms and often underdeveloped aviation infrastructure.
