Indonesian divers recovered from the seabed on Tuesday (12) one of the two black boxes of the plane with 62 people on board which crashed into the Java Sea last weekend.
According to local authorities, the search team found the device that records the flight data, which will allow us to understand in detail what caused the plane to crash moments after takeoff.
The divers also recovered a radio beacon, giving rise to hopes that the cabin’s voice recorder – the second black box – to which the beacon was connected, will also be found in the coming days.
“We are sure that the lighthouse which was attached to the cabin voice recorder has also been found in the area, so we are very confident that the cabin voice recorder will be found soon,” Military Chief Hadi said. Tjahjanto in a press conference this Tuesday.
There is still little answer as to what happened to Sriwijaya Air’s plane, and researchers expect recorder tapes to be able to determine what exactly went wrong. On Saturday, the Boeing 737-500 crashed at sea about four minutes after taking off from the main airport in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and disappearing from radar.
Before going into secrecy, the plane lost 10,000 feet in less than a minute, according to the site FlightRadar24, which monitors the flights. Indonesian Transport Minister Budi Karya said of the 62 people on board, 12 were crew members. Among the passengers there were 10 children. They were all Indonesians.
The National Transport Safety Committee (KNKT) must download the data from the black box within two to five days. “We hope that we can unravel the mystery of the cause of this accident. So it will be a lesson we must all avoid. [que se repita] In the future.”
The plane was an almost 27-year-old Boeing 737-500, according to information in the tracking file, and was in good condition, according to Jefferson Irwin Jauwena, chief executive of Sriwijaya Air.
At the time of take-off, it was raining heavily at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, which had already delayed the plane’s departure by 30 minutes. The planned route to Pontianak, 740 km from Jakarta, would take around 1.5 hours, but the plane lost contact around 4.30 a.m. on Saturday (Brasilia time; 2:30 p.m. in Jakarta).
A Boeing 737 MAX operated by the Lion Air airline crashed off the coast of Indonesia in late 2018, killing all 189 passengers and crew on board. This accident and another involving the same model in Ethiopia were attributed to technical flaws, and the manufacturer was ordered to pay a fine of 2.5 billion US dollars (13.56 billion reais) for misleading authorities in the process of approving this model. .
The plane that crashed on Saturday is an older model and lacks the system involved in the MAX line safety crisis.
While the chances of finding survivors have been widely dismissed by authorities, family members of the crew and passengers remain optimistic.
“We still cannot accept this,” Inda Gunawan, the sister of one of the passengers, told AFP news agency. “Our family is still waiting for a miracle and for her to be alive.”
The mother of a hairdresser who was on the plane after traveling to the Indonesian capital to purchase products for her salon, Emma Yusja also said she has not stopped praying for a miracle.
“I still believe in a miracle and that my daughter is alive, but I will accept whatever Allah decides for us,” he said.
According to funeral rituals in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, burials should take place as soon as possible after death, but the process of identifying the remains of the plane crash victims may still take Several weeks.
On Tuesday, relatives of the passengers and crew traveled to a hospital in Jakarta to collect DNA samples that will be compared with body parts found at sea.
More than 300 forensic pathologists are working on the analyzes. “Accuracy is more important than speed,” said Ahmad Fauzi, deputy head of the accident identification team.
Rapin Akbar, who had a blood sample taken, had five relatives on the plane, including an older sister, a nephew, his wife and their two-month-old baby.
“We hope they find the bodies quickly so that we can bury them,” Akbar said, still in shock. His nephew was planning to return to Pontianak on Sunday, but he changed his mind and decided to travel on Saturday.
“He called me to tell me the flight had been delayed and sent me a picture of his baby. It was his first child, ”he says.