VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Jakarta.  The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of the crashed Sriwijaya Air flight SJ-182 has been retrieved following a search extending more than two months, Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi informed on Wednesday.

"We can say what has been retrieved is (the result of) the effort to find better data," he said during a press briefing at the Jakarta International Container Terminal (JICT) II.

Without the CVR, the investigation into the cause of the plane crash in the waters off Seribu Islands cannot be completed, he pointed out.

With the retrieval of the CVR, both the black boxes of the Sriwijaya Air SJ-182 have been found.

"KNKT (the National Committee for Transportation Safety) has retrieved a lot of data from the flight data recorder (FDR). The data will be perfect if it is combined with what has been recorded in the CVR about the conversation between the pilot and co-pilot," Sumadi said.

The minister said he had reported the retrieval of the CVR to President Joko Widodo. The Transportation Ministry will hand over the CVR to the KNKT for further investigation, he added.

"Technically, we have reported (the CVR) to the President and will later hand it over to the KNKT for immediate follow-up. We hope the KNKT will conduct research in detail and classify the information found in the CVR," he remarked.

The Sriwijaya Air flight SJ-182, bearing the registration number PK-CLC, had lost contact on January 9, 2021 at 2:40 p.m. Western Indonesia time (WIB) shortly after take-off and crashed between Lancang Island and Laki Island, Thousand Islands, Jakarta. The plane had taken off from Jakarta and was headed to Pontianak.

Based on the manifest, the plane was carrying 50 passengers and 12 crew members on board. Of the total passengers, 40 were adults, seven were children, and three were infants.

All the passengers and crew members were killed in the crash.

The search operation for the Sriwijaya Air flight was officially ended on January 21, 2021, in accordance with the rules.

However, the search for the CVR memory had continued as it had gotten separated from its casing, which was retrieved on January 15, 2021.

After the search operation for the Sriwijaya Air flight was called off, the KNKT continued a manual search for the CVR.

"The search for the CVR memory has continued without the help of the underwater location beacon. So, we are searching for it ourselves on the seabed. That is the peculiar difficulty we are facing," KNKT chief Soerjanto Tjahjono had said during a hearing with Commission V of the House of Representatives (DPR) in Jakarta recently.

A CVR plays an important role in recording voices from four canals in an airplane — voice from the pilot's microphone, voice from the co-pilot's microphone, voice from the cockpit, and the reserved canal (cockpit and cabin interphone).

"FDR and CVR are important components in an investigation since they record flight data such as time, altitude, speed, coordinates and so on," he added.

The FDR of SJ-182 was located on January 12, 2021, three days after the plane crashed and was retrieved the following day. (Antaranews)