Second black box from Lion Air crash found

The cockpit voice recorder from a Lion Air jet that crashed last October has been recovered, Indonesian authorities said Monday, a discovery that could be critical to establishing why the brand new plane fell out of the sky shortly after take-off.

The Boeing 737 Max vanished from radar about 13 minutes after taking off from Jakarta, slamming into the Java Sea moments after pilots had asked to return to the capital and killing all 189 people onboard, AFP reports.    

Haryo Satmiko, deputy head of Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC), told AFP the box had been recovered early Monday morning.

Investigators have already recovered the flight data recorder from the Boeing 737 Max, which provided information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane before it plunged into the sea on October 29.

The preliminary crash report from Indonesia’s transport safety agency suggested that pilots of Flight 610 struggled to control the plane’s anti-stalling system immediately before the crash.

Investigators also found that the Lion Air jet should have been grounded over a recurrent technical problem before its fatal journey, but did not pinpoint a cause of for the accident.

A final crash report is not likely to be filed until later this year.

The bright orange voice recorder was discovered about 10 metres from the plane’s data recorder, said Isswarto, the commander of the navy’s Lion Air search and rescue task force.