Lion Air Crash: Search Focused on Main Fuselage and Black Box

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Head of the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) Air Vice Marshal M. Syaugi said the agency`s recovery team will focus its efforts on searching for the main fuselage of Lion Air flight JT 610 and the remaining part of the plane’s black box.

“Our search will be focused on the area in the vicinity of the black box we recovered yesterday and also the plane’s cockpit voice recorder,” said Syaugi in a written statement on Friday, November 2. 

The joint operation team recovered the plane’s flight data recorder yesterday at the depth of 32 meters after the black box’s transmission was received by the team’s equipment. 

Read: Final Seconds of Communication between Lion Air JT 610 and ATC

Syaugi said that the team will be separated into two sectors of recovery areas in its fifth day. “The first sector, the search, and rescue team (SAR) will conduct a creeping search. Meanwhile, the second sector will be doing a parallel search pattern,” he explained. 

The evacuation teams are assisted by five ships equipped with multibeam echo sounders (MBES), side scan sonars, ROV, and a ping locator for the missing part of the black box. 

The Lion Air flight JT 610 crashed into the Tanjung Karawang sea, West Java, on Monday, October 29. The Boeing MAX 8 lost contact with Soekarno-Hatta Airport’s ATC at around 06:32 Western Indonesia Time (WIB) just 12 minutes after taking off. 

SYAFIUL HADI