Black box from crashed Indonesian jet retrieved from debris on sea floor

JAKARTA (Reuters): Indonesian divers on Thursday retrieved a black box from a Lion Air passenger jet that crashed into the shallow sea off the coast of the capital, Jakarta, killing all 189 people onboard.

The device should provide clues to what went wrong after the plane lost contact with ground staff just 13 minutes after taking off early on Monday from Jakarta, on its way to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang.

“We dug and we got the black box,” a diver, identified as Hendra, told broadcaster Metro TV on board a search vessel, the Baruna Jaya, describing how his team found the orange-coloured box intact in debris on the muddy sea floor.

The diver said he had seen only “small pieces” of the aircraft, and the search had closed in on the black box because of the “ping’ signals it emitted.

The device, identified as the flight data recorder, would be handed over to Indonesia’s transportation safety committee (KNKT), authorities said.

The plane’s black boxes should help explain why the almost-new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet went down.

It could take up to three weeks to download data from the black boxes and up to six months to analyse it, Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of a national transport safety committee (KNKT), said on Wednesday.

Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of the national transport safety panel, told Reuters earlier an underwater drone had detected an object suspected to be part of the fuselage in waters about 30 metres (98 feet) deep not far from the site where the aircraft lost contact.

With media speculating on the airworthiness of the aircraft, the transport ministry suspended for 120 days Lion Air’s maintenance and engineering director, fleet maintenance manager and the release engineer who gave the jet permission to fly on Monday.

Lion Air will also be subject to more intensive “on ramp” inspections compared with other airlines. Regulators will check 40% of its flights at random, compared with 10-15% for other airlines, Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said.