Ill-fated Airbus' black boxes found

Ill-fated Airbus' black boxes found

MEDAN, North Sumatra (JP): Searchers found yesterday the two
black box recorders of a Garuda Indonesia Airbus which crashed
into a ravine near here more than three weeks ago killing all 234
people on board, an official said.

Chief of the Medan military air base Lt. Col. Benyamin S.
Dandel said the recorders were found buried some 20 centimeters
deep and 25 meters away from the crash site in Buah Nabar
village, Sibolangit subdistrict, Deli Serdang regency.

During the last three weeks, workers have been combing an
increasingly wider area in their search for the black boxes and
other evidence of the cause of the crash.

Benyamin said the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and the Flight
Data Recorder (FDR) were found by local farmers assisting the
government investigators led by Oetarjo Diran.

The FDR contains data about flight's direction, speed, and
altitude, while the CVR contains recordings of the conversations
between the pilot, co-pilot and air traffic controllers.

"Alhamdullilah (praise Allah) they have been found," said
Oetarjo who has led the army of searchers from the Armed Forces,
foreign and domestic experts, as well as local volunteers.

He said he would take the recorders directly to Canberra,
Australia, for analysis, today at the latest.

He said the recorders had to be analyzed as soon as possible
as there were fears the contents could be damaged if there was
too long a time lapse between the crash and the finding of the
boxes.

Only a handful of countries -- including Canada, the United
States and England, have the technology to interpret black box
recorder data.

"We trust Canberra because it has the technology to fix and
read data from possibly damaged black box recorders," Oetarjo
said.

In Jakarta, Minister of Transportation Haryanto Dhanutirto
said analysis could take "months" given the many parameters
involved. He did not elaborate.

Oetarjo said it was hoped the investigators would eventually
be able to conclude the "what, how, and why the accident
happened". (21/aan)