Basarnas in Search of AirAsia's Black Box (Final)

Divers on Tuesday finally found and took the cockpit voice black box from the Air Asia that crashed into the Karimate Strait on 28 December 2014 bringing 162 people aboard. Those divers had also recovered the data recorder the day before.

Those both devices will be analyzed in Jakarta and it is good news for investigators to reveal the cause of the aircraft crash.

The cockpit voice recorder comprises of two hours of conversation between the pilot, co-pilot , crew and air traffic control. The voice recorder was wedged under heavy pieces of wreckage nearby.  One of the staffs of the national search and rescue agency (Basarnas) said initial findings suggest the plane may have exploded on impact with the water after plummeting more than 30,000 feet.

The recovery of the black boxes is key to inform exactly what caused the crash of the Airbus A320 less than an hour into its scheduled two-hour flight from Surabaya, Indonesia to Singapore. Seemingly, it is taking weeks to download all the information taken from the black boxes. Those boxes are going to provide  an ocean of material, at least more than 200 parameters they have recorded.

Storms have been blamed for the crash of Flight 8501 by the weather service officials. The aircraft disappeared from radar after having asked permissions to increase altitude because of the bad weather conditions, but ATC (Air Traffice Controllers) in Jakarta rejected the request because of the high volume of traffic.

Searching for the plane and recovering bodies and black boxes were hampered by chronic storms, high winds, and cloudy seas. Luckily, those black boxes were found by the divers after hearing pings from devices but those divers had to dive 100 feet beneath the surface. Their great efforts should be appreciated as they had to face murky conditions and heavy currents.