JAKARTA: Indonesian investigators said they were homing in on the black box from a crashed jetliner after locating its “pings” , two days after the jet crashed shortly after take-off with 189 people on board.
Retrieving the black box will be key to unlocking why the Boeing 737-MAX, one of the world’s newest and most advanced commercial passenger jets, nosedived into the Java sea so soon after leaving Jakarta.
Authorities said they believed they were closing in on the main wreckage and had picked up the box’s signals some 100-130 feet below the surface of the water off Indonesia’s north coast, where the plane crashed on Monday.
“We’ve detected the black box signal,” Muhammad Syaugi, head of Indonesian search and rescue agency, told reporters in Jakarta.
The black box contains flight data that shows the speed, altitude and direction of the plane, while the cockpit voice recorder keeps track of conversations and other sounds in the cockpit.
