Indonesia calls off search for Lion Air crash victims, will keep looking for second black box

Indonesian authorities on Saturday stopped the search for passengers on board the Lion Air jet that crashed into the Java Sea on October 29, Reuters reported. All 189 people on board flight JT 610, flying from Denpasar to Jakarta, were killed. Last week, authorities had extended the search twice by three days each.

“There is nowhere left to search and we have stopped finding victims’ bodies,” said Muhammad Syaugi, head of the national search and rescue agency. “We will limit our operations to monitoring.”

Syaugi said the rescue team had retrieved 196 body bags containing human remains and 77 victims have been identified after forensic examinations so far.

While divers were able to locate the flight data recorder, they are still searching for the cockpit voice recorder. Finding it will be critical to understanding what caused the Boeing 737 Max plane to crash, said Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee head Soerjanto Tjahjono.

“From the black box data, we know about 70%-80% of what happened but to 100% understand the cause of the accident... we need to be able to know the conversation that took place in the plane’s cockpit,” he said.

Tjahjono said he was worried the cockpit voice recorder may have been damaged on impact as the safety committee is yet to detect any “pings” indicating its location. It has now deployed a pinger locator and a vessel that can suck up mud on the seabed, and remote-controlled and camera-equipped underwater vehicles to help with the search.

Authorities will continue the search for 15 aircraft parts, said Tjahjono. This includes an “angle of attack” sensor on the aircraft, which helps the plane’s computers understand if the aircraft is stable. Investigators had earlier said that one of these sensors had provided faulty data and the aircraft had experienced problems with its airspeed indicators on its last four flights.