Missing jet's black box found

2007-01-25 15:52

Jakarta - A US navy ocean survey ship has located the "black box" flight recorders from an Indonesian airliner which went missing on New Year's Day, the US embassy said on Thursday.

The USNS Mary Sears detected ultrasonic pinger signals from the ocean floor on the same frequency as the black boxes from the missing plane, the embassy said in a statement.

"In subsequent sweeping of the ocean floor around the pinger location, the Mary Sears detected heavy debris scattered over a wide area and is currently analysing that debris to verify if it is from the missing aircraft," it said.

Flight data recorders, which are bright orange, are usually located in the tail of an aircraft to maximise their chances of surviving a crash.

The Adam Air Boeing 737-400 was carrying 102 passengers and crew when it went missing halfway through its flight from Surabaya on the central island of Java to Manado on Sulawesi on January 1.

The search for the black boxes had been running against the clock as their emergency locator beacon usually emits an ultrasonic signal for just 30 days.

Officials said the government had now to decide whether to attempt the difficult task of retrieving the black boxes from the deep ocean floor.

"The next step is for me to report this finding to the government and the government will decide whether we will retrieve it or not," Setio Rahardjo, the chairperson of the national commission on transport safety, told AFP.

"We do not have the technology to retrieve the black boxes," he said.

"Assuming we have the funds, then we have to ask for a country who has sophisticated technology, such as the US."

- AFP