The “totally destroyed” Indonesian jet makes the search almost impossible

Photographer: Demy Sanjaya / AFP / Getty Images

Bayu Wardoyo tends to skip breakfast at 6 a.m. Indonesian fried rice served to boat divers looking for remnants of the Sriwijaya Air passenger jet that crashed into the Java Sea on January 9th. He prefers coffee, light snacks and some fruit to prepare for the long day.

Later in the morning, dressed in a black neoprene suit and heavy with diving paraphernalia, he climbs into a speedboat and exits under the heavy monsoon clouds toward the day’s search area. Once there, Wardoyo fixes his diving regulator and rolls overboard in the waters full of new tragedy.

Indonesia has suffered several air disasters over the past decade, and Wardoyo has been involved in more than its proportion of underwater searches. The 49-year-old worked on recovery efforts after a AirAsia aircraft with 162 people went down to the Java Sea in December 2014. Less than four years later, it returned to the same waters to hunt debris and bodies as a result of a Lion Air crash that was claimed 189 lives. It is now back there, after Sriwijaya Flight 182 crashed into the ocean with 62 people on board. Among them were seven children and three babies.

He has never seen a shock as devastating as this.

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

The SJ182 fell about 3,050 meters in 14 seconds shortly after taking off from Jakarta on a stormy Saturday afternoon. The National Transport Safety Committee of Indonesia confirmed that the Boeing Co. 737-500 the engines were running when the plane crashed into the sea at high speed, indicating that the plane was in one piece after the impact. What caused the violent dive remains a mystery.

One possibility that researchers are studying is that pilots lose control because a a malfunction of the accelerator produced more thrust in one of the engines, according to a person familiar with the situation. The device had had problems on previous flights, the person said.

With the search in its second week, hopes are dashed that the cabin voice recorder will never be found, a crucial piece in figuring out what developed. Various recovered the casing of the so-called black box on Friday, but the memory chip that records communication between pilots and the ambient sound in the cockpit had been undone.

The flight data logger was recovered last week and will provide clues as to whether it was a problem with the Boeing plane, a pilot error, a strange weather event or something else. But the investigation is paralyzed without the other black box. The locator beacons on both were dislodged when the plane exploded into the water, an impact so severe that according to Queensland air safety specialist Geoffrey Dell, it would have been like hitting concrete.

With the AirAsia crash in 2014, “the body of the plane was still intact, it only broke into three pieces, so we had to remove bodies from inside the plane,” Wardoyo said. .

“The Lion Air crash was different, the body of the plane disintegrated, but we could still find large chunks of the fuselage. Sriwijaya is the worst,” he said.