Cockpit voice recorder found from crashed Lion Air plane
Navy divers in Indonesia locate the black box from the passenger jet that crashed last year, killing all 189 people on board.
Monday 14 January 2019 07:57, UK
The cockpit voice recorder of the Lion Air jet that crashed in the Java Sea in October has been found by navy divers.
Ridwan Djamaluddin, a deputy maritime minister, said the National Transportation Safety Committee had informed the ministry about the discovery.
He said human remains were also discovered at the seabed location.
The two-month-old Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet plunged into the Java Sea just minutes after taking off from Jakarta on October 29, killing all 189 people on board.
The crash was the world's first of a Boeing 737 MAX jet and the deadliest of 2018, with contact having been lost with the JT610 flight just 13 minutes after it left the airport.
It had been bound for the mining town of Pangkal Pinang in the north of the country.
The cockpit voice recorder - found broken into two pieces - is one of the two so-called black boxes crucial for the investigation of a plane crash.
The other black box, the flight data recorder, was recovered three days after the crash.
Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of the transportation safety committee, suggested that it could take up to to three months to download, analyse and transcribe the contents of recorders.
Investigators - who in November found that the plane had not been fit to fly - brought in a navy ship last week for a fresh search after a 10-day effort funded by Lion Air failed to find the recorder.
Boeing did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Monday.
In a preliminary report, the Indonesian transport safety commission focused on maintenance and training, as well as the response of a Boeing anti-stall system and a recently replaced sensor, but did not give a cause for the crash.
Lion Air has faced scrutiny over its maintenance and training standards since the crash, and relatives of victims have filed at least three lawsuits against Boeing.
They have also urged the transportation safety committee to reveal "everything that was recorded" and to ensure they work independently to find out what happened.
Low-cost carrier Lion Air began operating in 2000, one year after its founding, and now operates 183 routes within Indonesia and surrounding countries including Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and China.
Between 2007 and 2016, the EU banned the airline from flying to member locations.
Lion Air is one of many new carriers in Indonesia, an island nation that relies heavily on air travel but has attracted a reputation for poor regulation.