Singapore's detector sought to find plane's black box

Tarko Sudiarno The Jakarta Post Klaten

Authorities here said on Sunday they would hire a detector from Singapore to find the flight recorder of a Garuda Airlines Boeing 737 plane that last week made a forced landing into a river in Klaten regency, Central Java.

"The cockpit voice recorder is not found yet and we are waiting for a detector from Singapore to investigate its whereabouts," Suryanto, a member of the rescuer team, told The Jakarta Post.

"We have our own detector but it cannot used to search for the black box because it could risk damaging or eliminating the records in it."

Suryanto said rescue workers tried to contact authorities in Singapore to help provide them with a detector soon, but failed to do so as Sunday was public holiday.

The plane carrying 54 passengers crash-landed into the Bengawan Solo river on Wednesday in bad weather at Serenan village in Juiring subdistrict, killing one female air attendant and injuring at least 32 people.

The plane remains floating in water, although it has shifted 15 metres downstream due to heavy currents, also blamed for the missing flight recorder.

The rescue and investigative teams flatted the river's bank on Sunday so as to put at edge the ill-fated aircraft. They had also sawed it's broken right wing to lift the engine out of the river.

Head of the Transportation Safety National Committee Oetaryo Diran the removal of the two wings could need at least three days, and the entire operation may take a whole week.

The fuel tanks, which now still hold some 4,000 liters of fuel (equal to 20 drums), have also been emptied and interior accessories, like chairs, glasses and other facilities, were also removed from the floating plane.

Diran said efforts were being intensified to raise and remove the 80-ton plane from the river.

Marine Chief Captain Achmad Himam said complete evacuation would still take more time, and what the marines could do now is to remove the light parts and equipment of the airliner.

Heavy equipment were on their way to the crash site, he added.

Frogmen from the Marine's Flotila Team, who arrived at the scene on Friday late afternoon, dived in the river at 100 meters from the crash site to search for the black box.

However, the persistently strong current continued to hamper their efforts to find the flight recorder in the five-meter deep river, which was also murky.

Rescuers and investigators believed that the black box must have slipped through some of the large holes in the damaged fuselage that was almost filled with water and silt.

"The flight recorder might have slipped through these holes and dropped into the water and was probably dragged downstream," said First Lt. Tek Djoko, a member of the frogmen team.

Another team from the state Bandung Technology Institute (ITB) arrived at the scene on Sunday to help develop the investigations into the cause of the crash.

Wednesday's crash-landing was the second accident last week involving an Indonesia-operated Boeing 737. On Jan. 14, a Boeing 737 operated by Lion Airline crash landed shortly after takeoff from Pekanbaru, in Riau province. Several people were injured.