By Jon Emont and Feliz Solomon
As divers approached the underwater area where they expected to
find the black boxes of Indonesia's Sriwijaya Air jet that crashed
into the sea, it became clear their task wasn't going to be
easy.
The site was strewn with sharp debris from the shattered Boeing
aircraft, posing a danger to them. Some pieces were too heavy to
dislodge with lifting balloons, which are usually used to surface
smaller parts. A navy vessel with a crane was called.
Searchers are struggling to find and reach the devices that are
critical to uncovering how and why the plane -- a 26-year-old
Boeing 737-500 that Sriwijaya Air says was in good condition before
the flight -- went down minutes after it took off from the capital,
Jakarta, on Saturday, carrying 62 people.
Both the flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders -- the
so-called black boxes -- are critical to understanding what
occurred aboard SJ182 before the crash. Flight-data recorders
typically collect information ranging from basic speed and altitude
to flight-control inputs by the crew, while voice recorders capture
sounds and conversations from the cockpit. Together, they can help
investigators determine the accident's cause.
"We hope we can have an idea of what happened in the flight,"
said Nurcahyo Utomo, head of aviation investigations for
Indonesia's national transport safety committee. "That's basically
what we expect from these black boxes."
It isn't unusual for the search for black boxes to take time
after a plane crashes into the sea. Authorities said Sunday that
they detected pings from the boxes -- an emergency feature intended
to help recover the devices after an accident. Divers dispatched to
seek out the recorders were equipped with direction finders to
pinpoint their location more precisely, the chief of the country's
search and rescue agency, Bagus Puruhito, said.
The devices are designed to withstand harsh conditions. Black
boxes from an Air France jet that crashed in 2009 were found nearly
two years later at a depth of almost 12,900 feet. After a Lion Air
jet crashed in 2018, also in the Java Sea, authorities found the
memory unit from one of the plane's two black boxes within days of
the accident that killed 189 people. But it took 2 1/2 months to
retrieve the cockpit-voice recorder.
The Boeing aircraft involved in the 2018 accident was the 737
MAX, the newest version of the company's single-aisle jet family,
which was grounded nearly two years ago following the Indonesia
crash and another one in Ethiopia in 2019. The Sriwijaya Air jet
that plunged into the water Saturday is an older model that doesn't
use the flight-control system largely blamed in the two 737 MAX
crashes.
Among the questions investigators have is why the aircraft made
an unexpected shift in direction shortly after taking off, flying
northwest, which prompted air-traffic control to ask the plane to
report its direction. The aircraft disappeared from the radar
seconds later.
Stormy weather that afternoon had delayed takeoff, another
factor investigators are probing. The plane departed at 2:36 p.m.
local time on Saturday, climbing to a maximum altitude of 10,900
feet about four minutes later and then beginning a steep descent,
according to aviation data provider Flightradar24. Authorities said
they didn't receive a distress call.
"Based on what we have, there was no declaration from the pilot
that they have a problem, or any report that they have an
abnormality," Mr. Utomo of the transport safety committee said.
"Based on the pilot communication with the traffic control,
everything looks normal."
Geoff Dell, an air safety investigator based in Queensland,
Australia, said what is known already -- that the plane changed
course shortly after takeoff and went down quickly -- still leaves
many questions unanswered.
"There are any number of possibilities, but the recorders will
give clues," he said.
If the recorders on this aircraft were the original installation
set, they would contain data about hundreds of flight parameters
that would tell investigators whether the plane was flown into the
water deliberately, if decompression in the cabin was a factor, or
if the aircraft was behaving unusually in any way, Mr. Dell
said.
"You can put it into a computer program that translates all that
data into something that's really easy to read, so you get a
real-time playback and you can see it all unfold," he said.
The flight's 54-year-old pilot Afwan was a former Indonesian
air-force pilot with years of experience flying older versions of
Boeing aircraft like the 737-500, a spokeswoman for Sriwijaya Air
said. His record was "very positive," the spokeswoman said.
Mr. Afwan's co-pilot was Diego Mamahit, who had worked for seven
years at Sriwijaya Air, most recently as a senior first officer,
and flew all around the Indonesian archipelago, according to his
profile on professional networking site LinkedIn. "I really love to
fly and enjoy my duties to operate Boeing 737 aircraft to all
domestic route in Indonesia," his profile reads.
The crash comes as the Covid-19 pandemic has battered the
airline industry around the world. In Indonesia, the transport
ministry suspended most flights in late April and gradually resumed
some air travel in early May. Asia-based aviation industry experts
said domestic travel has since stabilized at around 50% of
pre-pandemic flight frequency.
Some aviation experts worry that the lower frequency of air
travel during the pandemic could impact pilot practice or aircraft
flightworthiness. Planes grounded in Indonesia might also require
especially stringent maintenance inspections due to the country's
tropical climate which could speed the rate of corrosion, said
Shukor Yusof, the founder of Malaysia-based aviation consulting
firm Endau Analytics.
A spokeswoman for Sriwijaya Air said the airline hired
specialized firms for aircraft maintenance, but didn't respond to
requests for comment on what maintenance the aircraft that crashed
had undergone before the flight. She also didn't comment on whether
the pilots of SJ182 had been flying regularly in recent months.
Rama Noya, vice president of the Indonesian Pilot Association
and a Sriwijaya pilot, said although pilots' flying hours had been
roughly cut in half due to reduced flights during the pandemic,
Sriwijaya pilots were still flying around 40 to 50 hours a month,
including planes that were used for cargo transport. He thought
those hours were enough to keep them sharp. "This is sufficient,"
he said.
Throughout the day, search-and-rescue crews pulled out human
remains from the sea. Srie Rahayu, a 38-year-old resident of a
Jakarta outskirt, whose cousin and four other relatives were on
board, said she hopes search crews can recover the bodies.
Viriya Singgih contributed to this article.
Write to Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com and Feliz Solomon
at feliz.solomon@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 11, 2021 08:52 ET (13:52 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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