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)