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JAKARTA, Indonesia – Investigators have uploaded data detailing the last 19 flights of a new
Boeing
The plane that crashed in the Java Sea, confirmed Sunday his confidence in the fact that he will be able to get an idea of what's wrong before his cursed trip with 189 people on board .
The downloads accounted for 69 hours of data from the flight data recorder recovered Thursday on the seabed. The divers were still looking for a second black box, the cockpit voice recorder, which would probably have been buried under more than three feet of mud.
"We are confident that the data we have is correct," said Nurcahyo Utomo, investigator of the Indonesian Committee on Transport Safety. A detailed analysis of the data would begin on Monday, he said.
Investigators collected latitude and longitude data that correspond to information publicly released by monitoring networks, Utomo said.
The information disclosed by Flightradar 24, a tracking network, showed that the aircraft had encountered irregular readings of speed and altitude during the flight where it crashed on Monday, October 29, and during from the previous flight a day earlier between Bali and Jakarta.
A spokesman for the Indonesian Air Traffic Controller said the pilot of the previous flight had requested and secured a priority landing in Jakarta. Lion Air stated that the previous flight had experienced unspecified "technical problems".
Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the sea near Jakarta shortly after takeoff. This was the first accident involving the Boeing 737 Max 8, the latest variant of the popular 737 unibody.
The aircraft was delivered to Lion Air, one of the largest low-cost carriers in Asia, in August. The Ministry of Transportation has suspended, pending the results of the investigation, a director of Lion Air, as well as two directors and the engineer who authorized the flight 610 to fly.
Foreign experts, including representatives from the US Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, Boeing Co., and
General Electric
Co.
, partner of the engine manufacturer CFM International.
Download from memory included approximately 1800 data parameters. The flight data recorders track data ranging from basic speed and altitude to the position of the flight control surfaces and the flight control inputs of the crew.
The flight data recorder's memory was found at a depth of approximately 100 feet and had been removed from its case. The cockpit voice recorder issued pings for locating in the water, but so far escaped the divers. The beacons are designed to emit signals for at least 30 days.
"There is still a signal today, but it is weak compared to yesterday," Utomo said, adding that the recorder was probably buried in the mud. He added that divers had swept the area where the strong signal had been heard Saturday unsuccessfully.
Syahrul Anto, a 48-year-old diver, died Friday while searching the wreckage of the plane in search of victims. Mr. Anto was a veteran of other operations, including a
AirAsia
crash in the Java Sea nearly four years ago. The national search and rescue agency has not indicated a cause of death.
Muhammad Syaugi, head of the search and rescue agency, expressed hope that salvage operations could be completed by Wednesday. The crews recovered human remains and pieces of the plane, which disintegrated at high speed impact. On Sunday, they sent the remains in 32 body bags to the police for identification.
The agency has issued a map indicating the location of the main debris field off the north coast of the island of Java. The left and right turbines and the front wheels were found about ten meters from each other, while the flight data recorder was found about 700 meters away.
The accident is the second worst Indonesian air disaster, after a
Garuda Indonesia
accident that killed 234 people in September 1997.
The country has a long history of aviation accidents and its carriers have been barred for many years from traveling to the United States and Europe for security reasons. The latest restrictions imposed on Indonesian airlines were lifted in June of this year.
Write to Ben Otto at [email protected] and Gaurav Raghuvanshi at [email protected]
