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.
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