Adam Air strikes deal with salvage firm to retrieve black boxes of crashed airliner
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Indonesia budget airline Adam Air has reached an agreement with United States marine salvage firm Phoenix International to retrieve the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder (or "black boxes") from Adam Air Flight 574, a Boeing 737 aircraft that crashed into the sea on New Year's Day near Sulawesi, Indonesia during a scheduled domestic passenger flight, killing all 102 on board.
According to Adam Air chairman Adam Suherman the salvage operation will be conducted in July.
Previous disputes had left doubts over whether the devices would be retrieved at all, with both the government and Adam Air placing responsibility for funding the operation on each other. Indonesia does not have the equipment or the funds to conduct the operation itself, and had originally asked Japan, France and the US for help. They eventually announced that they would not pay for the operation, neither could they force Adam Air to.
However, Adam Air took it upon themselves to retrieve the recorders, culminating in this agreement with Phoenix. The lack of either recorder has thus far made determining the cause of the disaster extremely difficult.
Sources
[edit]- "Adam Air To Retrieve Black Box From New Year's Day Crash" — Aero-News, May 28, 2007
- "Indon airline nears black box salvage deal" — Daily Telegraph, May 25, 2007
- "Indonesia's aviation safety agency to publish preliminary report into New Year's Day Adam Air crash despite failure to locate black boxes" — www.flightglobal.com, March 5, 2007.
- "Indonesia Seeks Help To Retrieve Crashed Jetliner's "black Box"" — Playfuls.com, January 29, 2007
- "Indonesian airline, government battle over retrieval of black box" — monstersandcritics.com, January 26, 2007