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Lion Air disaster: Crashed jet's voice recorder recovered from Java Sea

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Wednesday, January 16, 2019

The National Transportation Safety Committee of Indonesia on Monday announced the cockpit voice recorder from Lion Air Flight 610 has been recovered from the Java Sea. All 189 on the aircraft died when the flight came down last October.

The aircraft photographed a month before the crash.
Image: PK-REN via Flickr.

The device was located and recovered "broken into two pieces" from under eight metres (about 25 feet) of mud, according to investigators. The new Boeing 737 Max was not airworthy, investigators have said, and should not have taken off. It was commencing a journey from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang and hit the ocean at speed shortly after asking air traffic control to return. It disintegrated upon impact.

The location of the device, and the location of the flight data recorder recovered in November, were around 50 m (165 ft) apart. Authorities said they found human remains nearby the second recorder.

Lion Air has been funding extended searches for both the recorder and outstanding human remains. The aircraft had been operating for days with a malfunctioning airspeed indicator; its angle of attack sensor had recently been replaced. Preliminary investigations suggest a new feature on the 737 Max, which had not suffered a crash before, was forcing the nose down in an erroneous attempt to prevent an aerodynamic stall, while the pilots tried and failed to correct this.


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