Indonesian navy divers on Thursday recovered a flight recorder from Lion Air Flight JT610, which crashed Monday outside Jakarta. Transport officials do not yet know whether the retrieved device is the flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder. A navy official told Indonesian reporters they’d also found the aircraft’s fuselage in the waters off the Indonesian capital.
The crash killed all 189 people on board and raises questions about the safety of Boeing’s new 737 Max 8 model. While the aircraft previously had an unblemished safety record, the plane involved in the accident had only accumulated 800 hours of flight time since it went into service with Lion Air, which has ordered 50 of the models, on August 15.
Boeing said it was offering “technical assistance at the request and under the direction of government authorities investigating the accident,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
A preliminary accident report should be available in a month, though a full report will take several months.
The accident is the worst in Indonesia since a 1997 crash killed 234 people. This saw Indonesian airlines temporarily banned from flying to European countries. Lion Air only regained access to the European Union in 2016.
In response to Monday’s crash, the Australia’s government has banned officials and contractors from flying on Lion Air pending results of the investigation.
