Indonesian Ships Retrieves AirAsia Black Box
Indonesia's Directorate General of Marine Transport says the black box of the doomed AirAsia flight QZ 8501 has been found.
A team of Indonesian navy divers on Monday retrieved one of the two black boxes from an AirAsia plane that crashed in the Java Sea two weeks ago, killing all 162 people on board, a government official said.
Indonesian rescuers have located the second black box too and the search continues for the cockpit voice recorder.
Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather on December 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore.
Divers began zeroing in on the sites a day earlier after three Indonesian ships picked up intense pings from the area, but they were unable to see the devices due to strong currents and poor visibility. The two instruments, which emit signals from their beacons, are vital to understanding what brought Flight 8501 down on Dec. 28
The flight data recorder was found on Monday morning under debris from the Airbus A320-200, including its wings, at a depth of about 100 feet, said Henry Bambang Soelistyo, head of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency. Indonesian navy divers managed to bring up the jet's flight data recorder, the first of the two black boxes.
“The recorder has already been evacuated to a ship” and will be transferred to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, for examination by the National Transportation Safety Committee, he said in a statement.
The recorders were at a depth of 30-32 meters (99-106 feet), he said in a statement.
