AirAsia flight’s black box recovered by divers in plane wreckage

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Search teams began retrieving the black boxes from the wreckage of the AirAsia jetliner, which will help investigators unlock how Flight 8501 plunged into the Java Sea with 162 people on board.

The flight-data recorder has arrived in Jakarta and is in good condition, Masruri, an air accident researcher from the National Transportation Safety Committee, told reporters Monday. It holds information such as the plane's altitude and speed. Searchers also found the cockpit-voice recorder, which captures conversations between the ground and the pilots, yet have been unable to retrieve it so far from the seabed, said S.B. Supriyadi, operations director at the national search agency.

Decoding information stored in the recorders and piecing together debris will help the investigators understand what factors led to the first fatal crash for Malaysia-based AirAsia. The Airbus Group single-aisle jet went off radar Dec. 28 while on a commercial flight to Singapore from Surabaja, Indonesia, after the pilot had requested changing course amid clouds in his path.

'The black box records critical aircraft flight parameters,” said Mark D. Martin, chief executive officer of Dubai-based Martin Consulting. 'This will be vital in understanding what happened during the last crucial moments of the flight.”

The flight-data recorder was lifted from the seabed Monday, Indonesia's search and rescue agency head F.H. Bambang Sulistyo told reporters in Jakarta. Divers had identified the location of the black box and marked the area for retrieval, Transport Ministry spokesman J.A. Barata said Sunday. The black box was stuck in the debris of the plane at a depth of 30-32 meters and the search team was trying to use balloons to lift the aircraft debris, the ministry said in a statement Sunday.

The cockpit-voice recorder and flight-data recorder are together known as the black box. Investigators use information from black boxes to reconstruct the final moments before a crash and sometimes come up with recommendations to prevent other disasters.

Flying at 32,000 feet, the plane's pilot had asked to rise to a higher altitude, citing clouds, officials have said. By the time air traffic controllers responded some two minutes later there was no reply from the plane. There were storms along the plane's flight path, yet other planes managed to fly through the same area at the same time without incident.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Committee are on board the ship Jadayat that found the black box, the transport ministry said in the statement. Waves hampered the recovery of the cockpit-voice recorder Monday, said Masruri, who like many Indonesians only has one name.

'Hopefully tomorrow it can be lifted,” said the search agency's Supriyadi. 'We also want to search the main body of the aircraft. Our hope is that in the main body we can find victims left in it.”

Search teams looking for the black box deployed side-scan sonar, pinger locaters and divers after finding the tail on Jan. 7. The black boxes, which are encased in bright orange to facilitate their retrieval, are waterproof, fortified and designed to emit an electronic signal underwater for 30 days to help searchers find them.

Safety advocates have been pushing for years to improve black boxes by enabling them to float and stream data to ground stations in real time. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board held a forum in October on the subject, and 'is currently exploring what the next steps might be,” including possible safety recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration, Peter Knudson, an NTSB spokesman, said in an emailed statement.

A spate of crashes in the past decade prompted Indonesia in 2008 to amend laws and boost plane-safety checks after the European Union imposed a ban on its carriers from flying to Europe. The ban has been partially lifted since then.

The AirAsia flight took off on a Sunday, without a transport ministry permit to fly that day. The government has since suspended the license of AirAsia for that route, found other airlines in breach of permits, and removed officials involved from the ministry, state air-navigation operator AirNav Indonesia and state airport company PT Angkasa Pura 1.

AirAsia Indonesia Chief Executive Officer Sunu Widyatmoko confirmed the suspension of the route license and has said the carrier will cooperate with an investigation.

Indonesia had 3.77 fatal accidents for every 1 million takeoffs in the three years ended March 31, London-based aviation adviser Ascend said in 2007. The global rate was 0.25 then.