The CVR Black Box From Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 Was Found On The Last Day Of Advanced Search

KNK officer carrying a black box containing CVR Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 (Photo: Special)

JAKARTA - The search team commanded by the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) managed to find a black box Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 aircraft with a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) type.

Chairman of the NTSC Soerjanto Tjahjono revealed that the discovery of a black box containing recorded conversations between the pilot and the copilot was found right on the last day of the follow-up search.

Further searches began on January 22, after the joint SAR operation led by National Search and Relief Agency (Basarnas) was stopped on January 21.

"Yesterday, friends (the search team) said, 'Sir, this is the last day of searching with this ship.' We both pray that we can find it. Thank God, last night was the last night in our advanced search to find this CVR", said Soerjanto at JICT 2 Pier, North Jakarta, Wednesday, March 31.

Soerjanto described the difficulty of finding the CVR black box during those two months. Like looking for a needle in the hay, he said.

Initially, the NTSC together with a team of divers from Basarnas and the Indonesian Navy conducted a search with their diving equipment.

Every single diver is only able to search for the black box that has been detached from the signal transmitter by searching for an area of 5x5 meters every 20 minutes.

"After a month and a half of searching using divers with all the equipment we have, it did not produce results", said Soerjanto.

The search team rested for one week. The NTSC evaluated the shortcomings of their current search methods. Finally, the search team continued their search on the TSHD King Arthur 8.

"Because there is a lot of mud in the area, with this TSHD ship we do a search with a sludge vacuum. It acts like a vacuum cleaner. We suck up to a depth of one meter in an area of 90x90 meters", he explained.

Finally, after several days of searching using a vacuum vessel, the CVR black box was found on the evening of Tuesday, March 30th. At this time, the black box was brought to the NTSC office to be analyzed about the cause of the crash.

The crash of the Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 plane on the Jakarta-Pontianak route began with a loss of contact in Kepulauan Seribu shortly after taking off from Soekarno-Hatta Airport on Saturday, January 9, 2020.

Furthermore, the authorities confirmed that the plane crashed around Laki Island and Lancang Island, Kepulauan Seribu at around 14:40 p.m. local time.

The number of passengers who took part in the flight consisted of 56 aircraft passengers and 6 crew members. Since the start of the search until the SAR operation was closed, 59 bodies have been identified by the National Police's Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team.

Then, the Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 black box with a flight data recorder (FDR) type was found on January 12, 2021 by the joint SAR team. At that time, the FDR was immediately taken to the NTSC for analysis.