Indonesia seeks foreign help to get flight recorder

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

JAKARTA, Jan 30 (Reuters) Indonesia has asked for foreign help to recover the black box of a missing airliner from deep on the sea bed, but the mission may prove impossible at depths of up to 2,000 metres an official said today.

Last week, a US Navy ship detected signals suspected of coming from flight recorders aboard the Adam Air Boeing 747-400 which disappeared on New Year's Day.

The chief crash investigator said last week a camera-equipped Remote Operated Underwater Vehicle (RoV) might be able to retrieve the black box. Since then, Indonesia has sought help from the United States, France and Japan.

''Today, we will meet the US ambassador to discuss the capability of their retrieval technology. France has offered to help and we are awaiting word from Japan,'' said Setio Rahardjo, Indonesia's national transport safety board chief.

Despite continuing efforts to obtain the necessary equipment, Rahardjo told Reuters he was not certain that such a retrieval could be performed in the Adam Air case.

The flight recorder, set up to emit a signal for 30 days to aid detection, may be lying deep on the floor of the Makassar Strait.

Wreckage from the airliner, which went missing during a flight from Java to the North Sulawesi city of Manado, was first sighted in waters off the west coast of Sulawesi island more than a week after the accident.

There were 102 people aboard including three Americans, a father and his two daughters. No bodies have yet been found.

Rahardjo said his team still hoped to recover the black box but said the main body of the plane had probably disintegrated.

''The undersea wreckage is in the form of small pieces and shreds so the body no longer exists, according to the observations from (USNS) Mary Sears,'' he said, referring to the US Navy ship that located the flight recorder.

''We need to retrieve the black box because that is the best way we could reveal how the plane fell,'' Rahardjo said.

The undersea search had been ended, but a search for pieces of the plane or bodies was still being conducted on the surface, Transport Minister Hatta Rajasa was quoted by Koran Tempo newspaper as saying.

Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said on Friday it was the airline's responsibility to pay for the retrieval of the black box, but cast doubt on whether it would ever be retrieved.

Before the 17-year-old plane vanished in bad weather, its pilot made no distress call but had reported concerns over crosswinds.

The disaster has focused attention on the shoddy state of the transport infrastucture in Indonesia and in particular over safety regulations after a host of no-frills budget airlines sprang up in the past few years.

REUTERS PB MIR RAI1152

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