Indonesian jet ‘totally destroyed’ makes search almost impossible

Photographer: Demy Sanjaya / AFP / Getty Images

Bayu Wardoyo tends to skip breakfast at 6 am with Indonesian fried rice served to the ship’s divers in search of the wreckage of the Sriwijaya Air passenger jet that crashed in the Java Sea on 9 January. He prefers coffee, light snacks and some fruit to prepare for the long day ahead.

Later in the morning, wearing a black neoprene suit and overloaded by diving paraphernalia, he boards a speedboat and leaves under the monsoon clouds for the day’s search area. Once there, Wardoyo hooks up his scuba regulator and rolls overboard in waters full of new tragedies.

Indonesia suffered several air disasters in the past decade, and Wardoyo has been involved in more than his fair share of underwater searches. The 49-year-old man worked on the recovery efforts after a AirAsia jet carrying 162 people sank in the Java Sea in December 2014. Less than four years later, he returned to the same waters to hunt for debris and bodies in the wake of a Lion Air accident you claimed 189 lives. Now he’s back there, after Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 plunged into the ocean with 62 people on board. Among them were seven children and three babies.

He has never seen an accident as devastating as this.

“This Sriwijaya accident is the worst. The aircraft body is completely destroyed and scattered, ”said Wardoyo by text message. “We found only small pieces of human remains. In the Lion Air accident we still found large pieces and in the AirAsia accident we found almost a complete human body. “

The SJ182 plummeted nearly 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) in 14 seconds just after Jakarta took off on a stormy Saturday afternoon. The Indonesian National Transport Safety Committee confirmed that the Boeing Co. 737-500’s the engines were running when the plane hit the sea at high speed, indicating that the aircraft was whole at the time of impact. What triggered the violent plunge remains a mystery.

One possibility that investigators are investigating is the loss of pilots’ control because a the faulty accelerator was producing more thrust in one of the engines, according to a person familiar with the situation. The device had problems on previous flights, the person said.

With the search in its second week, hopes are fading that the cabin’s voice recorder – a crucial piece of the puzzle to find out what happened – will be found. Scuba divers he recovered the so-called black box casing on Friday, but the memory chip that records the communication between the pilots and the ambient sound in the cabin had come loose.

The flight data recorder was recovered last week and will provide clues as to whether this was a problem with the Boeing plane, pilot error, bad weather or something else entirely. But the investigation is paralyzed without the other black box. The locating headlights of both were displaced when the plane crashed into the water, an impact so strong that, according to Queensland air safety expert Geoffrey Dell, it would have been like hitting concrete.

With the fall of AirAsia in 2014, “the aircraft’s body was still intact – just broken into three pieces, so we had to pull the bodies out of the aircraft,” said Wardoyo.

“The Lion Air accident was different, the aircraft’s body disintegrated, but we could still find large pieces of the fuselage. Sriwijaya is the worst, ”he said.