JAKARTA, Indonesia — Search and rescue divers working in Indonesian waters heard regular “pings” in what authorities are hoping Wednesday will turn out to be the main body of the Lion Air plane that plunged into the Java Sea shortly after take off on Monday morning.
A team of rescuers on Tuesday heard pings from an underwater locator beacon with a distinct sound and interval between them — ruling out that it could be fish, and making it very likely that the wreckage and the location of flight recorder had been identified, said Soerjanto Tjahjono, head of the National Transportation Safety Commission.
“Hopefully before long, we can find the black box,” he told reporters. “We hope the position of the black box is also the position of main wreckage of the ship, and the victims will be there.”
All 189 people onboard are believed to have died in the crash. Finding the main body of the aircraft, including the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, would be a significant development for investigators who are working to determine what caused the almost brand-new Boeing jet to crash in good weather about 13 minutes after it took flight.
Danang Mandala Prihantoro, a spokesman for Lion Air, said on Wednesday that the airline fired its technical director, Muhammad Asif, at the direction of the Ministry of Transportation. An interim replacement was appointed to the position.
A team of engineers from Boeing will arrive in Jakarta on Wednesday for meetings with Lion Air, according to Indonesia’s transportation safety committee.
One hundred divers were searching five areas off the coast of the island of Java, said Didi Hamzar, the national search-and-rescue agency’s director of preparedness, after a large, unknown object was detected underwater by an Indonesian naval vessel. So far rescuers have pulled debris, including wallets, purses and phones from the water as well as body parts, but the plane’s fuselage remains missing.
“Now divers are working to confirm it [the object],” he said. Officials expected to have more information by evening, Hamzar added.
[Indonesians recover human remains, belongings from area of crash]
The new twin-engine Boeing 737 Max 8 airplane took off from Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport for the mining region of Pangkal Pinang early on Monday morning when, just a few minutes into the flight, the pilot asked to return to the airport.
Radar showed that the aircraft climbed and descended erratically, and that its speed increased dramatically. The flight then lost contact.
Officials insist it is too soon to predict the cause of the crash, which has puzzled experts. In the context of Indonesia’s patchy aviation safety record, however, lawmakers have already started to call for a tightening of standards and a government-led audit of the country’s airlines.
Bambang Soesatyo, speaker of the Indonesia’s House of Representatives, on Wednesday called on the government to conduct an immediate inspection of all airlines operating in the country, saying this was “not the first event,” of aviation trouble in Indonesia.
Indonesia — the world’s largest archipelago — is Southeast Asia’s biggest aviation market, according to the Center for Aviation, a travel market research company, but has in the past suffered from safety oversights.
Its airlines were banned from flying to the United States in 2007 because they were “deficient in one or more areas, such as technical expertise, trained personnel, record-keeping, or inspection procedures.” The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ban in 2016 after the country’s airlines showed signs of improvement. The European Union similarly barred Indonesian carriers from flying into European airspace from 2007 until June.
Lion Air has been involved in a number of incidents in the past few years, but none with fatalities. One of its jets collided with a plane from another carrier, Wings Air, on the island of Sumatra last year, but no one was injured.
In 2013, a Lion Air flight crashed into the sea short of the airport runway on the resort island of Bali. Several were injured, but no one was killed. Investigators determined the case of that crash to be pilot error. The plane was also produced by the Chicago-based Boeing and was just weeks old at the time of the accident.
Ainur Rohmah in Jakarta, Indonesia contributed to this report.
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