The head of the National Transportation Safety Commission, Soerjanto Tjahjono, told reporters that the plane’s engine “was still in good condition” and the plane was flying at high speed when it plunged nose-first into the ocean.
“We can due to this fact confirm that the impact was high energy, which caused the aircraft to be significantly fragmented and broken into small pieces,” Soerjanto said.
The force of the impact tore off the external electronics of the black box and a part of the recorder’s structure.
But news photos show that the module holding the data-storing core is undamaged, and the module found Thursday should eventually turn into operational, said James Cash, a former NTSB investigator who has processed 1000’s of such recorders.
“I’m sure the memory will be great,” said Cash, who retired as the security board’s chief technical adviser on recorders.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who met with officers supervising the search operation in Jakarta on Friday, asked the National Transportation Safety Commission to take quick motion to find out the causes of the disaster. “We should not have any accidents like this in the longer term,” he said. “Passenger safety must be a priority.”
The National Search and Rescue Agency could also be near finding the essential wreckage of the plane and the cockpit voice recorder, its head M. Syaugi told reporters.
The ocean depth on the crash site is about 35 meters, and robust currents and waves make the search difficult, he added.
On Sunday, pilots warned Lion Air a few speed fault within the doomed plane. It crashed on the subsequent flight
On Sunday, pilots warned Lion Air a few speed fault within the doomed plane. It crashed on the subsequent flight
Flight data and cockpit voice recorders, often called black boxes despite the fact that they’re painted brilliant orange, store information concerning the plane’s electronics and systems, in addition to pilot conversations, which helps in accident investigations.
More than 4 days after Lion Air flight JT610 crashed into the ocean carrying 189 people, search teams recovered little apart from small pieces of the plane, body parts of the victims and private items.
The seek for clues has conjured up images of the years-long and to this point unsuccessful seek for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014.
A silent jump, then a deafening crash: how the Lion Air tragedy unfolded in Indonesia
A silent jump, then a deafening crash: how the Lion Air tragedy unfolded in Indonesia
While final information on the Lion Air crash could take days or even weeks, the airline says the plane had problems with sensors used to calculate altitude and speed on a previous flight. The problem was checked by maintenance staff overnight before the plane was cleared for the ill-fated flight, the airline said.
The transportation safety commission said Friday that on the eve of the crash it interviewed the crew of the plane that operated the flight from Bali to Jakarta and in addition collected data from a military radar station outside the country’s capital.
Divers are searching the Java Sea to get well the stays of a plane that crashed into shallow waters near Jakarta. On Friday, they found a part of the plane’s landing gear and more plane parts.
“We found larger pieces yesterday, not just small pieces of debris,” Syaugi said. “Now we are looking in the right place.” He added that the agency plans to brush a bigger area starting Saturday.
The transport ministry said it will intensify inspections of planes and ground them with technical problems that would not be resolved. On Thursday, the ministry ordered the suspension of Lion Air managers chargeable for quality control and fleet maintenance, in addition to the engineer who cleared Flight JT610 for takeoff.
The ministry said on October 31 that the Indonesian government announced “severe sanctions” against Lion Air if an investigation by the security board finds negligence on the a part of the airline.
Horrifying video shows doomed travelers boarding a Lion Air flight
Horrifying video shows doomed travelers boarding a Lion Air flight
In the early days of flight recorders, which first got here into use within the Nineteen Sixties, damage from accidents often made it difficult to acquire useful data. The earliest models etched lines into the foil to point out altitude and flight path. Analog tape recorders were used to record sounds within the cockpit.
However, devices manufactured in recent many years have turn into computerized and depend on memory chips which have proven to be highly reliable.
The frame that houses the protected data module is designed to interrupt off within the event of an accident, and the external electronic components don’t function when immersed in water, no matter whether or not they are intact or not, Cash said. The manufacturer provides tools to acquire data after an accident, he said.
Based on photos of the device recovered from the Lion Air plane, Cash identified it as a tool constructed by L3 Technologies Inc. He processed an analogous device on the jet that crashed into the Pentagon at high speed on September 11, 2001, and survived the extreme blaze that followed.
“It was a pretty hard hit,” he said. “It didn’t hurt in any respect.”
Cash stated that he didn’t recall ever losing data contained on this family of L3 recorder models.
The Lion Air tragedy has raised latest questions on the state of safety in a rustic whose airlines were for years considered too dangerous to fly over Europe. According to the Aviation Safety Network database maintained by the Flight Safety Foundation, Lion Air was among the many Indonesian airlines banned by the EU between 2007 and 2016.
Indonesia is made up of 1000’s of islands, and its domestic airline market has boomed lately to turn into the fifth largest on the planet. According to the CAPA Center for Aviation, local airline traffic greater than tripled between 2005 and 2017 to 97 million people and is dominated by flag carrier PT Garuda Indonesia and Lion Air Group.
Carriers faced issues of safety, partly resulting from the pace of this rapid expansion, in addition to problems inherent in a region with mountainous terrain, equatorial storms and infrequently underdeveloped aviation infrastructure.
Additional reporting by the Associated Press
This article appeared within the print edition of the South China Morning Post as: a broken black box complicates the investigation into the failure
