Australians send Indonesia crash plane box to U.S.
Source: Reuters
(Adds comments from special Indonesian team on transport) CANBERRA, March 12 (Reuters) - The cockpit voice recorder from an Indonesian airliner that crashed last week in Java has been sent to the United States after Australian experts failed to retrieve vital information, an investigator said on Monday. A team of Australian investigators worked on the two flight data recorders through the weekend, but said they were unable to retrieve cockpit voice recordings. Other flight information, however, was successfully decoded. "We have tried every method we can to download the cockpit voice recorder without success and that includes in consultation with the component manufacturer Honeywell in the U.S.," Australian Transport Safety Bureau Deputy Director Joe Hattley told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. Garuda Indonesia flight GA200 which had 140 people on board overshot the runway in Yogyakarta last Wednesday and burst into flames in a paddy field, killing 21 people including five Australians. Indonesian crash investigators asked their Australian counterparts for help determining the cause of the accident. Mardjono Siswosumarno, Indonesia's chief investigator for the Yogyakarta crash, dismissed reports a strong downdraft hit the plane as it prepared to land. "There was no downdraft according to the meteorology office. The pilot and the co-pilot have not said anything about any downdraft," he said. The pilots escaped without major injuries, but investigators have not yet gleaned much information from them due to their traumatised state. Australia's Hattley said information from the flight data recorder, including data such as the speed of the plane, its vertical acceleration, flap settings and wind speed, had been sent to Indonesia. The bureau's executive director, Kym Bills, said it was up to Indonesian investigators to assess the data decoded so far. "It's more of a matter of checking it against the physical evidence and the other evidence that they've gathered on the accident site and in relation to the whole investigation," Bills said. Mardjono said his team would finish interpreting the flight data this week. Indonesia has suffered a string of transport accidents in recent months. An Adam Air plane disappeared in January with 102 people on board and a ferry sank in December killing hundreds. A special team set up by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in January to review Indonesia's transport situation has found that safety levels in the country have fallen since the deregulation of the sector, the team's spokesman said. "Our safety level is low and this was caused by the 2001 (airline) deregulations. We found systemic weaknesses in funding and human resources," Oetardjo Diran told reporters after meeting the president. Air travel in Indonesia, a country of more than 17,000 islands, has grown substantially since the liberalisation of the airline industry that has triggered price wars among airlines. (Additional reporting by Mita Valina Liem and Muklis Ali in JAKARTA)
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