Indonesia to resume search for crashed plane's black box

Indonesia will on Tuesday resume the search for one of the two black boxes of the Lion Air aircraft, which had crashed into the Java Sea in October killing all 189 people on-board.

Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) chief Soerjanto Tjahjono said that a military ship, KRI Spica, will sail towards Karawang, which is near the area where the accident occurred, if weather conditions were favourable.

"I think that this boat is sophisticated enough to help us find the CVR (recording of the conversation of the pilots in the cabin)," Soerjanto told Efe news.

Soerjanto added that the search, which was suspended in November due to bad weather in the area and bureaucratic and budgetary obstacles, will last a week and that the box has a 90-day locator beacon.

The Boeing 737 Max 8 Lion Air plane had crashed into the Java sea at a great speed, minutes after taking off from the Jakarta airport.

Search teams had recovered one of the black boxes, which record flight data, three days after the tragedy, which allowed the KNKT to release a preliminary report on the causes of the fatal crash, including erroneous data from the sensors of the aircraft.

Lion Air had hired a private company to resume the search for the CVR over a 10-day period between end December and early January but it failed to yield any result.

--IANS

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