Salvage teams find cockpit voice recorder of Sriwijaya Air jet lost in fatal crash in Java Sea

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of a commercial passenger aircraft that had crashed in Indonesia’s Java Sea earlier this year has finally been found, the country’s Basarnas search and rescue (SAR) agency has confirmed.

The CVR from Sriwijaya Air Flight 182, a Boeing 737-500 jet aircraft, was located and recovered by marine salvage teams at a depth of 14 metres just off Male Island in the Thousand Islands Regency approximately 70 kilometres from Jakarta at 20:00 local time on Tuesday, March 30.

An Indonesian transportation ministry official said the CVR’s recordings will be transcribed and matched to the data provided by SJ182’s flight data recorder, which was recovered three days after the incident on January 9.

The same official added that, had the CVR not been recovered, accident investigators will have difficulty in identifying what caused the aircraft to crash into the water just four minutes after it took off from Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on a scheduled flight to West Kalimantan.

Air traffic controllers who had been monitoring the flight on January 9 said that SJ182 was at an altitude of 3,000 metres when it suddenly made a series of abrupt dives until it finally impacted the sea. No mayday calls were heard from anyone on board.

Indonesian authorities and numerous media outlets worldwide have reported that all 50 passengers and 12 crew perished in the incident.