Black boxes from Indonesia plane crash found

A US Navy ship has picked up signals from the flight data recorders of an Indonesian plane that crashed into the sea on New Year’s Day with 102 people onboard, the US Embassy said today.

The US Mary Sears located signals “on the same frequency of the black boxes associated with the missing plane”, a statement issued by the US Embassy in Jakarta said.

Data from the flight recorders will be crucial in determining the cause of the crash, but retrieving them from the ocean floor at a depth of some 5,600 feet will probably be a difficult, expensive and lengthy operation.

The Adam Air Boeing 737 went missing more than three weeks ago after reporting heavy winds off the western coast of Sulawesi while flying from Indonesia’s main island of Java.

Search teams have since found almost 80 pieces of debris from the plane, but no bodies.

The embassy did not say when the black box signals were picked up or where on the ocean floor off Sulawesi they were coming from.

The hull of the aircraft has not yet been recovered, but the statement said that close to where the signals were coming from “the Mary Sears detected heavy debris scattered over a wide area” that was being analysed to verify if it was from the missing aircraft.

Eddy Suyanto, the Indonesian air force commander in charge of the search and rescue mission, said he had not been formally informed of the ship’s findings.

“One thing is for sure. Up until this second, I have not received any report from the (Indonesian) liaison officers who were onboard the ship,” he said.

The embassy statement said that “having completed its mission” the Mary Sears would leave Indonesian waters tomorrow.