Sriwijaya Air Crash; KNKT to Extract Black Box Data

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The National Transportation Safety Commission (KNKT) Chief Soerjanto Tjahjono on Tuesday said it will need up to five days to extract the data from the flight data recorder (FDR) retrieved from the wreckage site of Sriwijaya Air SJ182 plane.

“We ask for people’s prayers so the FDR data extraction that could take two to five days will pan out smoothly,” said the KNKT Chief at the JICT 2 port of Tanjung Priok on January 12. 

Extracting and analyzing data from the FDR is crucial to uncover the cause of the aircraft’s tragic crash into the shallow sea in the vicinity of Jakarta’s Thousand Island (Kepulauan Seribu).

The search and rescue team currently searching the seabed at the Sriwijaya Air wreckage site continues to look for the second black box or the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) along with important pieces of wreckage from the Boeing 737-500 that is believed to have disintegrated upon the incident. 

"We hope we will quickly find it to solve the mystery behind the accident,” said Soerjanto. 

Meanwhile, Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) Commander Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto said the search team mobilized across the perimeter of the crash site continues to evacuate the victims’ remains and aircraft wreckages that would help in the investigation. 

“The operation is not over yet, because we will continue evacuating the victims and aircraft wreckages that need to be entirely retrieved and investigated by the KNKT,” said the TNI Commander. 

Read: Search Team Retrieves Black Box from Sriwijaya Air Wreckage

M JULNIS FIRMANSYAH