Indonesia believes it has located crashed jet's fuselage and black box

JAKARTA: Indonesian search and rescue workers believe an underwater “pinging” sound they have detected is from the black box of a passenger jet that crashed into the sea with 189 people on board, the country’s military chief said on Wednesday.

Ground staff lost touch with flight JT610 of Indonesian budget airline Lion Air 13 minutes after the Boeing 737 MAX 8 took off early on Monday from Jakarta, on its way to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang.

Military chief Hadi Tjahjanto said that divers had already gone down to check the location from where the signal was picked up by a search and rescue team late on Tuesday, but were contending with strong currents.

“We hope tonight we can drop anchor and release the ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle) again and I am sure we will find a black box given the strong indication, and, not far from there, the main body of the plane,” Tjahjanto said.

Search and rescue agency chief Muhammad Syaugi said the current was so strong it had shifted a large ship, while efforts were further complicated because of oil and gas pipelines in the vicinity.

Syaugi said he believed the fuselage was located 400 metres north west of where the plane had lost contact at a depth of 32 metres. If found, the fuselage would be lifted using a crane, because many bodies were likely to be trapped inside, he added.

The accident is the first to be reported involving the widely sold Boeing 737 MAX, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer’s single-aisle jet.

The plane’s black boxes, as the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are known, should help explain why the almost-new jet went down minutes after take-off.

Once retrieved, it could take up to three weeks to download their data and up to six months to analyse it, Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of a national transport safety committee (KNKT), said.

Amid media speculation over the airworthiness of the aircraft, the transport minister suspended Lion Air’s technical director and several technicians to facilitate the crash investigation.

The suspended technicians “issued the recommendations for that flight”, the ministry said in a press release. It did not say how many technicians had been suspended.