Basarnas Opens Opportunities To Extend Victim Search And CVR Sriwijaya Air SJ-182

Illustration - Basarnas members are preparing to carry out the evacuation process of the Sriwijaya Air Sj-182 plane that crashed in the Thousand Islands (Angga Nugraha / VOI)

JAKARTA - Deputy of Search and Rescue Operations and Preparedness of the National SAR Agency (Basarnas), Bambang Suryo Aji, said that the extension of the search for victims and the Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 CVR depends on conditions in the field.

"We will see the results later because the first extension will be until Monday. Later we will evaluate how, whether to extend it or not, wait for the evaluation results tomorrow," said Suryo at Jakarta International Container Terminal (JICT) II, North Jakarta, Sunday, 17 January.

According to Bambang, there are two main considerations to extend the search, which is planned to be terminated tomorrow, Monday, January 18th. First, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and victims have not been found.

"So, let's see the situation in the field. Then there are also some aircraft instruments that have not been found such as CVR and others. Then I also see that every day there are still many of us evacuating parts of the victim's body, later we will see the progress there is reduced or different because the influence has been carried away and so on, "he said.

In addition, there are also considerations from families who want their family members to be found. He said, this is also the concern of Basarnas.

"Maybe he wants his family who got this disaster to be identified, if in the field there are still many victims that we are still evacuating, we will continue to carry out the evacuation," he said.

The weather problem, according to Bambang, was quite an obstacle for the team to conduct a search. This is because the winds and currents that were quite strong around the crash site made the pieces of the fuselage carried away.

"The weather that is a problem now is indeed the weather, because in that location apart from the winds and down currents which are quite strong, it affects us to carry out searches, especially for CVR searches and body parts," he said.

As is known, previously the Indonesian Navy had found several parts of the CVR. These parts are the CVR casing and underwater locator beacon (ULB). Meanwhile, the memory which is the main component of CVR has not been found. Until now, the SAR team is still searching.

On Saturday, January 16 yesterday, the ROV belonging to the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) was also deployed to look for CVRs, but nothing came of it.

Meanwhile, the SJ-182 black box FDR or flight data recorder which had already been found had already downloaded the data. Chairman of the National Committee for Work Safety (KNKT) Soerjanto Tjahjono said the download results were being analyzed.