Possible location of crashed jet found

All that’s left: Families of passengers of Lion Air flight JT610 looking at the belongings of the passengers at Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta. — Reuters

JAKARTA: A massive search effort has identified the possible seabed location of the crashed Lion Air jet, Indonesia’s military chief said, as experts carried out the grim task of identifying dozens of body parts recovered from a 15-nautical-­mile-wide search area, and chilling video of passengers boarding the fatal flight emerged.

The two-month-old Boeing plane plunged into the Java Sea on Monday just minutes after taking off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.

“This morning I’ve been briefed by the head of Search and Rescue Agency about the strong possibility of the location” of Flight 610, said armed forces chief Hadi Tjahjanto.

Separately, the head of the National Transportation Safety Committee, Soerjanto Tjahjono, told reporters that pings detected by search teams are definitely from the aircraft’s flight recorder because of their regular interval.

The disaster has reignited concerns about safety in Indonesia’s fast-growing aviation industry, which was recently removed from European Union and US blacklists, and also raised doubts about the safety of Boeing’s new generation 737 MAX 8 plane.

Boeing Co. experts were expected to arrive in Indonesia yesterday and Lion Air has said an “intense” internal investigation is underway.

Navy officer Haris Djoko Nugroho said the 22m-long object that could be part of the fuselage is at a depth of 32m. He said it was first located on Tuesday evening.

“There are some small objects that we found, but last night, thank God, we found a large enough object,” he said.

Data from flight-tracking sites show the plane had erratic speed and altitude in the early minutes of a flight on Sunday and on its fatal flight on Monday. Safety experts caution, however, that the data must be checked for accuracy against the plane’s black boxes, which officials are confident will be recovered.

Several passengers on the Sunday flight from Bali to Jakarta have recounted problems that included a long-delayed take off for an engine check and terrifying descents in the first 10 minutes in the air.

Two interviewed on Indonesian TV recalled details such as a strange engine sound, a smell of burnt cables, and panicked passengers crying out for God to save them as the plane rapidly lost altitude. Later in the flight, a man in pilot’s uniform walked through the plane and returned to the cockpit with what looked like a large manual.

Lion Air has said maintenance was carried out on the aircraft after the Sunday flight and a problem, which it didn’t specify, was fixed. — AP