Indonesia ‘may have found fuselage of ill-fated jet’

Indonesian military officials believe they have found the location of the fuselage of a passenger plane that went down into the sea off the island of Java two days ago and that presumably killed all the 189 people on board it.

Military chief Hadi Tjahjanto said on Wednesday that using sonar technology, authorities are confident they had pinpointed the location of the Boeing 737-MAX plane that crashed on Monday morning.

“We strongly believe we’ve determined the coordinates of the JT 610 fuselage,” he told reporters in the capital, Jakarta. “However, it has not yet been confirmed that it is part of the fuselage.”

Authorities have now sent divers to check if a “ping” signal picked up by a search and rescue team was from the plane body.

A search and rescue team detected the ping sound in a location at a depth of 35 meters on Tuesday afternoon, according to Haryo Satmiko, the deputy chief of the national transport safety panel.

“This morning, [...] the team has gone back to dive at the location,” he added.

Teams of divers were also deployed to the site in search for the jet’s black boxes, in an effort to find out why the almost brand new plane sharply nosedived only 13 minutes after leaving the Soekarno Hatta international airport in sunny weather.

Hundreds of rescue workers have already recovered debris and personal items as well as body parts of the passengers from the Java Sea.

Dozens of relatives of the missing had gathered at a police hospital in Jakarta to provide DNA samples for forensic experts, who are trying to identify the body parts collected in 37 body bags from the water.

Cause of crash still unknown

Fresh questions have now been raised about the performance of the Boeing 737, one of the American plane maker’s newest and most-advanced jets that, according to head of the National Transport Safety Committee (NTSC), was delivered to Lion Air just in August.

Uncertainty about the crash has also prompted many calls on Indonesian officials to ground Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 planes, though Jakarta has so far refused to so.

Boeing said in a statement on the day of the crash that it “stands ready to provide technical assistance to the accident investigation,” while the US National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are both sending investigators to Indonesia.

Air accident investigators said there had been technical issues on the plane on Sunday.

The airline’s chief executive Edward Sirait has also admitted that a “technical issue” with the same two-month-old aircraft was reported during a flight from Bali to Jakarta on Sunday evening. But he insisted the issue was resolved “according to procedure.”

Aviation-safety.net — a website that keeps track of aviation accidents, incidents, and hijackings — however, reported Tuesday that the same “erratic” speed and altitude variations reported by the pilots at the jet’s last successful flight the day earlier appeared to have occurred before, too.

Haryo Satmiko, the deputy chief of the national transport safety panel, confirmed that the problems on Sunday included unreliable airspeed readings but explained, “The suspected cause of the accident is still being investigated and it is making us all curious what could have caused it.”

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