Indonesia confident on finding second 'black box' of crashed plane

Divers resume sea search for crashed plane's 2nd black box An aerial search for victims and wreckage of a crashed Indonesian plane has expanded as divers continued combing the debris-littered. So far authorities have been unable to explain why the 26-year-old plane crashed just four minutes after setting off from Jakarta, bound for Pontianak city on Borneo island, a 90-minute flight away.

Indonesian divers believe they are close to finding the cockpit voice recorder of a Sriwijaya Air jet that plunged into the sea shortly after takeoff with 62 people onboard.
Divers retrieved the plane's flight data recorder (FDR) from the seabed on Tuesday and officials said they had also found the beacon that was attached to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR). 'God willing, we will find it today,' said Navy official Wahyudin Arif, referring to the cockpit voice recorder.

Indonesia team search and rescue bring debris from Sriwijaya aircraft that crash on Wednesday in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: VCG

He told KompasTV on Wednesday divers would comb a very narrow area of the seabed for the voice recorder, adding that divers found the first black box by shifting debris on the seabed piece by piece and he suspected the same process would be needed to find the other recorder.
Military chief Hadi Tjahjanto said on Tuesday he had 'high confidence' of finding the recorder soon.
The Boeing 737-500 jet crashed into the Java Sea on Saturday four minutes after takeoff from Jakarta's main airport.
Investigators will rely heavily on the two black boxes to determine the cause of the crash.
Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee expects to download the FDR data within two to five days.

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Second Crash Program Indonesia Raya

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Jakarta, Indonesia – Investigators are yet to determine the cause of this month’s Sriwijaya Air plane crash in Indonesia that killed all 63 people on board, but the disaster has once again put the spotlight on maintenance, training and safety across the country’s transport system.

“There are correlations between the poor safety records of different forms of transport in Indonesia,” Ziva Arifin, president of Aviatory Indonesia, a consultancy in Jakarta, told Al Jazeera. “But each individual sector faces unique challenges, and aviation is the sector that has seen the most significant safety improvements in recent years.”

Indonesia has recorded 104 civilian aircraft accidents and more than 1,300 related deaths since 1945, making it the Asia Pacific’s deadliest country to fly according to the Aviation Safety Network.

Risks rose markedly in 2001, when deregulation gave birth to a slew of new low-cost airlines, including Sriwijaya Air, which started operations two years later.

Amid cut-throat competition, a subsequent price war contributed to poor maintenance and a string of fatal air disasters.

By 2009, the number of accidents per million departing flights had risen to 18.35 compared with a world average of 4.11, according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), and Indonesian airlines had been banned from flying to the United States and the European Union.

Several new aviation laws introduced later that year forced airlines to invest in safety.

The result was a significant improvement in safety with the most recent ICAO audit showing Indonesia now ahead of the worldwide average in five out of eight categories, including accident investigations and airworthiness of planes.

The US and the EU have also dropped their bans on Indonesian airlines.

‘Tragedies at sea’

But there have been few improvements in other – less high-profile – forms of transport.

Indonesia has the highest number of boating and shipping accidents in the world, according to the Baird Maritime Passenger Vessel Accident Database.

Its data shows there have been 645 passenger vessel accidents in Indonesia since 2000 – more than any other country in the world – and 33,700 people have lost their lives.

The sheer number of boats operating in an archipelagic nation of 17,000 islands is a contributing factor. But so is the lax enforcement of safety regulations that regularly sees passenger and cargo limits ignored.

In 2018, more than 200 people died when a ferry licensed to carry 60 passengers sank in Lake Toba, a crater lake and popular holiday destination in Sumatra. In July, nine people drowned after a wooden boat licensed to carry 15 departed from Timor Island with twice that number on board and capsized.

“We have these constant tragedies at sea because safety inspectors at ports don’t do their jobs,” said Siswanto Rusdi, director of the National Maritime Institute in Indonesia. “According to the law, any vessel that leaves port must be visually inspected to check the number of passengers, the amount of cargo carried and the condition of the boat. But in practice, this rarely happens. Most safety inspectors spend their time playing cards instead.”

Ross Taylor, president of The Indonesia Institute, a think-tank in Perth, experienced first hand the dangers on a ferry to the Thousand Islands, the string of tropical islands near Jakarta’s north coast where Sriwijaya Air’s flight SJ182 crashed into the sea.

“At around the halfway mark a big storm hit and massive waves began smashing over the front window, drenching everyone inside,” he recalled. “I heard a deckhand yell to the captain ‘Turn back, turn back, or we will roll over!’ Passengers were screaming and vomiting but the captain pressed on. We made it in the end, but my wife was traumatised. She never wants to visit Indonesia again.”

He adds: “It was not a one-off experience. Anyone who travels on boats in Indonesia has similar stories.”

Road risks

Travelling by road is risky, too. Tens of millions of private vehicles, the absence of laws setting limits for blood alcohol concentration and traffic police who generally forgive violations for cash bribes has helped place Indonesia in fifth place for the highest number of road accidents in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

The nation’s vast fleet of buses is particularly prone to accidents because of a leave-when-full school of scheduling that encourages passengers to stand in aisles or sit on rooftops. When drivers apply brakes suddenly, tragedy easily follows.

An only-replace-parts-when-they-break attitude to maintenance adds to the risk. On a bus trip in West Kalimantan province this month, Al Jazeera’s reporter noticed the driver had hooked up an old water bottle with a hose on the dashboard to feed fluid into the steering system.

Flouting traffic laws is also the main cause of the 300-odd accidents that take place at railway level crossings in Indonesia each year, according to the Indonesia National Traffic Accident data.

In 2019, a car carrying seven people in West Java was hit by a train, killing everyone on board, after the driver ignored the closed gate and alarm bells to try and get across the railway lines before the train. In June, a man narrowly escaped with his life after driving through an ungated railway crossing as a train was approaching and his car suddenly stalled.

A safety inspector for the Ministry of Transport in Jakarta who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to speak to the press told Al Jazeera comprehensive laws and regulations apply to all forms of transport in Indonesia, He insisted all modes of public transport go through “rigorous” checks in advance of their departures.

Despite improvements, Indonesia’s aviation industry still has some way to go.

“While big, fatal crashes are not as common as before in Indonesia, you still see a good number of near misses, such as runway excursions following unstable approaches,” said Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at FlightGlobal, an aviation industry news site. “There are still signs that a comprehen