Divers bring bags filled with debris and body parts on January 11 off the coast of Jakarta.
Photographer: Demy Sanjaya / AFP / Getty Images
Photographer: Demy Sanjaya / AFP / Getty Images
Bayu Wardoyo tends to skip breakfast at 06:00 from Indonesian fried rice served to divers on the ship in search of wreckage of the Sriwijaya Air passenger plane that crashed into the Java Sea on January 9. He prefers coffee, light snacks and some fruit to prepare. for the long day ahead.
Later in the morning, dressed in a black wetsuit and weighed down by diving equipment, he boarded a speedboat and set off under heavy rain clouds for the day’s search area. Once there, Wardoyo attaches his dive regulator and rolls it overboard into waters filled with fresh tragedy.
Source: Indonesian Diver Rescue Team
Indonesia suffered several air disasters over the past decade, and Wardoyo has been involved in more than just a large portion of the investigations into the sea. The 49-year-old worked on a recovery effort AirAsia plane with 162 people went down in the Java Sea in December 2014. Less than four years later, he returned to the same waters to hunt for wreckage and corpses in the wake of a Lion Air crash claimed 189 lives. Now he is back there, after Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 plunged into the sea with 62 people on board. Among them were seven children and three babies.
He had never seen an accident so devastating.
“This Sriwijaya accident is the worst. The plane’s body was completely destroyed and scattered, “Wardoyo said via text message. ‘We only found small pieces of human remains. At the Lion Air crash we still found large pieces and the AirAsia crash we found almost a complete human body. ”
Search Challenge
The rubble of Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 is spread over an area of about two kilometers
Sources: Mahakarya Geo Survey, FlightRadar24
SJ182 dropped near 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) within 14 seconds shortly after taking off from Jakarta on a stormy Saturday afternoon. Indonesia’s National Transport Safety Committee has confirmed that the Boeing Co. 737-500’s engines were running when the plane hit the sea at high speed, indicating that the plane was in a piece after attack. What caused the violent dive remains a mystery.
One possibility that investigators are investigating is that the pilots are losing control because a according to a person familiar with the situation, a malfunctioning accelerator caused more pressure in one of the engines. The person had problems with previous flights, the person said.
With the search in the second week, hopes are fading that the voice recorder of the cabin – an important figure piece to find out what unfolded – will ever be found. Divers detected the casing of the so-called black box on Friday, but the memory chip that records the communication between pilots and the ambient noise in the cockpit broke loose.
The flight data recorder was recovered last week and will provide clues as to whether it was a problem with the Boeing plane, pilot error, a freak weather or something else. However, the investigation is determined without the other black box. The locomotives of both were ripped loose when the plane burst into the water, an impact that was so severe that it would have been like hitting concrete in Queensland, according to air safety specialist Geoffrey Dell.
With the AirAsia crash in 2014, ‘the fuselage was still intact – only broken into three pieces, so we had to pull bodies from inside the plane,’ ‘Wardoyo said.
‘The Lion Air crash was different; the plane’s body disintegrated, but we could still find large parts of the fuselage. “Sriwijaya is the worst,” he said.
Indonesian investigators extended the search period and extended the divers’ stay on the commando vessel off the coast to the north of Jakarta, but late Thursday afternoon suspended the hunt for victims. Wardoyo leads a group of 15 civilian professional divers with different qualifications such as deep-sea exploration and cave diving. One is a police officer and diving instructor. The team of volunteers supports specialist divers from the National Search and Rescue Agency, or Basarnas. He is not optimistic about restoring the rest of the voice recorder.
“Since the body of the plane is completely broken into very small pieces and the seabed is very thick mud, it will be very difficult to collect anything after more than seven days,” Wardoyo said. “It’s almost impossible to find the memory or another piece of the recorder.”
A diver in the navy stops debris from flight SJY182. One of the dangers for divers includes heart attacks due to overexertion caused by the lifting of heavy waste in strong currents.
Photographer: Adek Berry / AFP / Getty Images
An NTSC official in Indonesia said Tuesday that data from the cockpit voice recorder is needed to support the findings from the flight data analysis. Representatives of Boeing, the US National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration and General Electric Co. traveled to Indonesia to assist with the investigation. A preliminary report of the crash should be published within 30 days, local authorities said Tuesday.
Bad weather and open sea in the monsoon season in Indonesia has hinder recovery efforts. “Big swells, strong winds and rain will not affect the divers below, but it makes it difficult for the surface team that uses rubber boats,” said Wardoyo. “It also makes it harder for divers to move to the mothership when the weather is bad.”
The commando vessel had to return to shore early Wednesday after it was damaged in a collision with another boat in a heavy swell and strong wind around 1am, according to Wardoyo. The divers returned to the crash site later in the morning in a smaller boat.
While diving carries some risk, regardless of the circumstances, it is magnified on a search mission, Wardoyo said. Shark attacks are not a problem, but decompression sickness, drowning and even heart attacks due to overexertion caused by lifting heavy pieces of wreckage in strong currents are one of the dangers.
“We do not take credit for that, but can at least help others with our expertise,” said Wardoyo. “Anyone else will do the same.”
Navy personnel removed part of the plane recovered in the Java Sea on January 12. The engines of the plane were running when the plane hit the sea at a high speed.
Photographer: Tatan Syuflana / AP Photo
Under the difficult circumstances, authorities could use other means to collect aircraft waste instead of relying on divers, according to Jakarta aviation analyst Gerry Soyatman. “They can use vacuum pumps or dredging once all the victims have been identified or there are no more human remains at the scene,” he said.
Wardoyo, who lives with his wife in Jakarta, has been involved in the search since the day after the accident. At sea, the teams wake up early around 5am and an information session is held on the day’s plans for breakfast. Wardoyo holds the meetings with the commander of the Basarnas specialist diving team. If the weather allows it, they go to the search area at 8 or 9 o’clock on rubber boats or tight inflatables.
On good days, underwater visibility is three to five meters, but this week it dropped to one meter or less, Wardoyo said. In the aftermath of the accident, Indonesian officials informed the media about the number of bags with body parts and aircraft wreckage brought ashore. Members of Wardoyo’s team wear, according to the Basarnas protocol, surgical gloves under diving gloves to deal with human remains.
“It’s not fun for us, but we always think of the families who have lost their loved ones,” Wardoyo said. “It’s not easy, we have to move centimeter by centimeter.”
– With the help of Harry Suhartono, Adrian Leung, Alan Levin and Angus Whitley
(Add search for victims that was canceled late Thursday in the 12th paragraph.)