Voice box from Indonesia plane crash recovered

Indonesia has found the cockpit voice recorder of a Lion Air plane that crashed off the country’s coast last year, Indonesian officials said Monday, raising hopes that recordings could help explain how the pilots battled an apparent mechanical failure.

Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, in late October, killing all 189 people on board.

Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of the country’s transportation safety committee, confirmed in a text message that the cockpit voice recorder had been found Monday morning.

Ridwan Djamaluddin, a deputy maritime minister, also said in a text message Monday that human remains had been discovered at the crash site.

The plane was a brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8, the latest model of Boeing’s workhorse 737 fleet. Its black box, which records flight data, was recovered in early November.

FILE PHOTO: Indonesian customs officers patrol at a search area for Lion Air flight JT610 in Karawang waters, Indonesia, November 1, 2018. REUTERS/Edgar Su/File Photo

The pilots fought to save the plane almost from the moment it took off, as its nose was repeatedly forced down. They managed to pull the nose back up over and over until finally losing control, leaving the plane to plummet into the ocean at 450 mph.

Data from the plane’s black-box recorder appears to support a theory among investigators that a computerized system Boeing installed on its latest generation of 737 jets to prevent them from stalling instead forced the nose down. The aircraft was recording errant data from one of the two angle-of-attack sensors on its nose, which are designed to record the pitch at which a plane is climbing or descending.

Yet the precise cause of the crash remains unknown, and a preliminary report on the accident released by Indonesian crash investigators in November was notably lacking in significant details. Among other questions, it is still not clear whether the errant data, which was on the pilot’s side of the plane, was attributable to a problem with the angle-of-attack sensor or with the computer that processes the sensor’s information.

The plane’s cockpit voice recorder, if undamaged, could provide further insight into specific steps that the pilots took as the jet’s course became violently erratic. It may also help investigators determine which specific problems could be attributed to Boeing, Lion Air or the Indonesian authorities.

FILE PHOTO: An Indonesian National Transportation Safety Commission (KNKT) official carries debris from the crashed Lion Air flight JT610 at Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, Indonesia, Nov 4, 2018. REUTERS/Beawiharta/File Photo

Despite Boeing’s insistence that the proper procedures were in the plane’s handbook, pilots have said since the accident that the company had not been clear about one potentially vital difference between the system on the new 737s and those of older models. In the older ones, pilots could help address the problem of the nose being forced down improperly by pulling back on the control column in front of them — a measure that does not work in the 737 Max 8.

Another question is how Lion Air, a budget airline that has a spotty safety record, handled repeated failures with the plane’s data readings for days before the crash, including a problem with an angle-of-attack sensor on its penultimate flight.

Employees and experts say that long before the deadly crash, the Indonesian carrier prioritized rapid growth and political clout over safety.

© 2019 New York Times News Service