Indonesia Plans to Retrieve Adam Air's Black Boxes

Ali Kotarumalos
The Associated Press

Indonesia will attempt to retrieve the flight data recorder from a jetliner that crashed into the sea with 102 people - a difficult and expensive operation given the ocean's depth but key to determining the cause of the accident, officials said Friday.

A U.S. Navy vessel picked up signals from the Boeing 737's flight data and cockpit recorders, known as black boxes, in waters off Sulawesi island and informed Indonesian authorities of their location, the U.S. Embassy said Thursday.

At a depth of 1,700 meters (1 mile), recovery efforts may be prohibitively costly, forcing the government to eventually abandon the operation, Vice President Jusuf Kalla said Friday.

But Adam Air vowed to see the search through.

"If the signals really were from the black boxes and the technology is available to retrieve them, we will keep on trying," said Adam Air spokesman Ali Leonardi. "It does not matter what the cost."

The Adam Air plane was flying from Indonesia's main island of Java to Sulwesi's northern tip on New Year's Day when it ran into rough weather, but the pilot did not issue a mayday or report technical problems.

It took weeks before search and rescue teams found traces of wreckage. They have since brought in almost 200 pieces of debris - mostly small pieces of the wings, tail, cockpit and cabin - but no bodies.

Small, unmanned submarines controlled by remote control have been used in other countries to recover black boxes - which include crucial data such as a plane's speed and altitude as well as the voices of the pilots - from jetliners that crashed in the sea.

But Setyo Raharjo, head of the National Commission on Transportation Safety, said the government did not have the seabed salvage technology required. Commercial salvage companies, however, could be called in.

Jim Hall, a former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, noted that the Boeing 737-400 is one of the world's most popular planes, so determining the cause of the crash is "extremely important" for aviation safety.