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Indonesian divers found the main wreck of the Lion Air plane that crashed into the Java Sea, a breakthrough after a week of searching for victims and a voice recorder in the post of pilot who held the key to understand the reason for the accident.
Divers traveling through a 270-square-kilometer area since the jet crash on October 29 spotted the Boeing 737 Max 8 fuselage on Saturday, Syaugi, head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters. Jakarta, Saturday. The research team is now focusing on wreckage recovery, he said.
"We have made major breakthroughs by recovering two turbines, one wheel," said Syaugi. "There are reports of team members seeing the body of the plane."
Indonesian search teams have found a flight data recorder, both engines, part of the landing gear, body parts of victims and personal belongings since the Lion Air JT610 flight carrying 189 people plunged at the sea.
Ping locators have also picked up a weak signal possibly coming from the cockpit voice recorder, said Syaugi. A diver, who volunteered in search operations, died Friday, he said.
The plane dipped so abruptly that it may have reached a speed of 100 km / h or more before it collapsed into the sea, according to three experts who made calculations from tracking data. preliminary flights.
He dived with little or no turns and his nose was pointed at about 45 degrees below the horizon shortly before impact, an unusually steep dive for an airliner, according to data analysis provided by flight tracking company FlightRadar24.
The speed of the aircraft will eventually be confirmed by the recovered flight data recorder, which has not yet been analyzed. The Indonesian authorities have not published any details on the trajectory or speed of the aircraft. The accident occurred shortly after takeoff of the plane between Jakarta and Pangkalpinang.
The FlightRadar24 data, which was captured from the aircraft's radio broadcasts, suggest that the jet was moving at about 1014 kilometers at the hour (630mph) hour before shortly before the aircraft. to reach the Java Sea.
The estimate was first computed by Scott Dunham, a former National Transportation Safety Board investigator, who combined the distance traveled by the aircraft horizontally and vertically to obtain an estimate of speed. Dunham, who participated in the 2003 investigation into the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia and on dozens of investigations of aircraft accidents, conducted the analysis at the request of Bloomberg News.
According to a slightly different method, John Hansman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimated that the plane was flying at 540 mph in the last moments before the FlightRadar24 system lost its track. .
The high-speed descent – which, according to Hansman, would have rendered the objects and passengers of the aircraft weightless or perhaps even in negative gravity – offers a new insight into the final moments of the accident. Yet this does not give a clear answer on why the plane crashed.
"They were diving on the ground," Hansman said.
A third expert, Jasenka Rakas, a lecturer in engineering and aviation at the University of California at Berkeley, conducted her own data analysis and concluded that the speed could have been between 586 and 633 mph.
Raw data from FlightRadar24 suggests that the jetliner was downhill at around 350mph. This figure represented the speed at which the aircraft lost altitude and did not represent the higher speed at which it glided vertically.
Dunham, Hansman and Rakas warned that the estimates gave only approximate speeds.
However, the estimated speeds were consistent with what would happen when a 737 with its engines running was steered sharply down and was starting to accelerate. It was also what one would expect, according to the small sample of heavily damaged aircraft debris found in the water near the accident site, they said.
"If the nose was heavy enough and it was still energized, it would take a lot of speed," Dunham said.
The accident investigation is conducted by the Indonesian National Committee for Transport Safety. The agency is assisted by representatives of NTSB, Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration.
A crash – proof recorder containing data on the operation of the aircraft, its speed and trajectory was found. Its content has not been read yet.
Pilots in flight the night before the morning accident had reported sensor problems that calculate altitude and speed, said a spokesman for the airline on Wednesday.
During the approximately 11 flight minutes followed by FlightRadar24, the aircraft frequently changed altitude and speed. Even if none of these changes were as abrupt as they would pose a security risk, this suggests that the pilots had difficulty controlling the aircraft. Airliners flying on autopilots are much more consistent.
FlightRadar24's data includes GPS positions, altitude, time, and the speed at which it would have traveled horizontally across the Earth's surface. In the last 1.6 seconds prior to the disappearance of the jet track, at 425 feet above the water, he lost 1,025 feet of altitude.
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