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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS