Indonesia finds Sriwijaya Air plane cockpit voice recorder in Java Sea

Divers with the Indonesian Navy have recovered the voice recorder from the cockpit of a Sriwijaya Air plane that crashed into the Java Sea in January, killing all 62 people on board, officials say.

Transport Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said divers recovered the recorder around 8 p.m. local time Tuesday, near where the flight data recorder was recovered three days after the accident.

The contents of the recorder were not immediately available. However, the device could help researchers determine what caused the Boeing 737-500 to sink into the ocean in heavy rain shortly after taking off from Jakarta on January 9.

If the voice recorder is not damaged, it could tell investigators what the pilots were doing, or not doing, to regain control of the plane during its brief and erratic flight.

Searchers have recovered aircraft parts and human remains from an area between the Lancang and Laki islands in the Thousand Islands chain, north of Jakarta. The flight data recorder tracked hundreds of parameters that showed how the plane was operating.

Most of the recovery efforts ended about two weeks after the accident, but a limited search continues for the missing memory unit of the cockpit voice recorder, which apparently became separated from other parts of the device during the accident.

The bright orange voice recorder was brought to Jakarta and handed over to the National Committee for Transportation Safety (KNKT), which is overseeing the investigation of the accident.

“We hope KNKT can share information about what is contained in this VCR to improve the safety of our aviation,” Sumadi said, referring to the Indonesian acronym for transportation committee.

KNKT president Soerjanto Tjahjono said the device will be taken to the researchers’ “black box” facility. It will take five to seven days to dry and clean the device and download its data, he said.

“Without the CVR … it would be difficult to determine the cause of the plane crash,” said Tjahjono, “we would disclose it transparently to avoid similar accidents in the future.”

Rear Admiral Abdul Rasyid Kacong, commander of the Navy’s Western Region fleet, said the voice recorder was buried under one meter of seafloor mud at a depth of 23 meters. Divers cleared debris and carried out “mud removal” operations to reach the logger, he said.

Data from a preliminary investigation report, which did not express any conclusions, showed that the throttle lever of the aircraft’s left engine moved backward on its own while the autopilot was engaged, reducing the power of that engine before the plane sank into the sea.

That report provided new details on persistent problems with an autothrottle on the 737-500 Sriwijaya Air jet and the airline’s efforts to fix them. Pilots can use an automatic throttle to adjust speed automatically, reducing workload and wear on the engines.

It could also help answer questions for those who lost people in the disaster.

“I warmly welcome the finding of the TRC … this is a relief to our despair,” said Rafik Yusuf Alaydrus, whose wife, Panca Widia Nursanti, a teacher, died in the accident.

“We hope this can answer what caused the accident, especially for us who lost our loved ones,” he said.

The 26-year-old plane had been out of service for nearly nine months due to flight cuts due to the pandemic before resuming commercial flights in December.

The disaster has rekindled safety concerns in the aviation industry, which has grown rapidly alongside the economy since the fall of dictator Suharto in the late 1990s.

The United States banned Indonesian carriers from operating in the country in 2007, but lifted that restriction in 2016, citing better compliance with international aviation standards. The European Union lifted a similar ban in 2018.

Sriwijaya Air had only had minor safety incidents in the past, although a farmer was killed in 2008 when a plane ran off the runway while landing due to a hydraulic problem.

In 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliner operated by Lion Air crashed shortly after taking off from Jakarta airport, killing 189 people. An automated flight control system played a role in that accident, but the Sriwijaya Air plane did not have such a system.