An aircraft crashed into the Java Sea with 62 people on board shortly after taking off from Indonesia’s capital has sent shock waves across the world. Authorities said they determined the location of the crash site and black boxes of a Boeing 737-500 on Sunday, a day after the mishap.
The head of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, Bagus Puruhito, said officials believe they identified the location of the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder the so-called black boxes because emergency signals transmitted by the devices were detected by a navy ship’s sonar system.
We have determined the position of the plane’s black boxes from two signals emitted by the devices, military chief Hadi Tjahjanto said. Hopefully we can lift the black boxes in short time to determine the cause of the crash. Earlier Sunday, search and rescue operations resulted in parts of the plane being found in the sea at a depth of 23 meters (75 feet), leading rescuers to continue searching the area. We received reports from the diver team that the visibility in the water is good and clear, allowing the discovery of some parts of the plane, Tjahjanto said in a statement. We are sure that is the point where the plane crashed. He said the objects found included broken pieces of fuselage with aircraft registration parts.
Earlier, rescuers pulled out body parts, pieces of children’s clothing and scraps of metal from the surface. The break in the search for Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 came after the navy ship’s sonar equipment detected a signal from the aircraft at a location that fit the coordinates from the last contact made by the pilots before the plane disappeared Saturday afternoon, Tjahjanto said. The plane was en route from Jakarta to Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan province on Indonesia’s Borneo island, on a flight that was expected to take around 90 minutes. It was still unclear what caused it to crash. There was no sign of survivors. Global community should find out a solution to prevent such mishaps.