The smashed fuselage of a crashed Indonesian Lion Air jetliner might have been found, a top military commander said yesterday, as Jakarta ordered the removal of the budget carrier’s technical director and staff who cleared the doomed flight for takeoff.
Authorities said they were confident sonar technology had pinpointed the location of the Boeing 737-MAX plane that plunged into the sea on Monday.
“We strongly believe we’ve determined the coordinates of the JT610 fuselage,” General Hadi Tjahjanto told reporters.
Authorities are racing to find the downed jet’s location in water about 30m to 40m deep in the hope of also finding flight data recorders crucial to crash investigations.
“We have not found the black box’s location, but it’s in the area, within a 3 kilometer radius,” Soerjanto Tjahjono, head of Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, told Kompas TV. “Usually the black box location is near the main wreckage.”
Dozens of divers were taking part in the 1,000-strong personnel recovery effort along with helicopters and ships, but authorities have all but ruled out finding any survivors.
Boeing officials were expected to meet yesterday with Lion Air, after Indonesia ordered an inspection of the US plane maker’s 737-MAX jets.
The downed plane, which went into service just a few months ago, was en route to Pangkal Pinang when it crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia’s northern coast moments after it had asked to return to Jakarta.
Indonesian Minister of Transportation Budi Karya Sumadi yesterday took the unusual step of ordering the removal of Lion Air’s technical director and several other staff, citing government authority over the aviation sector.
“Today we will remove Lion’s technical director from his duties to be replaced by someone else, as well as technical staff” who cleared the flight to depart, he told reporters.
However, he later said the measure was meant to free up the technical director to help with the crash probe.
Lion’s admission that the plane had an unspecified technical issue on a previous flight — as well as the plane’s abrupt nosedive just 12 minutes after takeoff — have raised questions about whether it had any faults specific to the newly released model, including a speed-and-altitude system malfunction.
Meanwhile, distraught relatives yesterday sifted through clothes, wallets and other retrieved personal effects on a Jakarta dockside, as authorities sent body parts to hospital for DNA testing.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion