Vital AirAsia clues to be revealed as both black boxes pulled out of Java Sea

JAKARTA - In what could help the investigators with vital clues about what happened before the ill-fated AirAsia Flight QZ8501 went down in the Java Sea, Indonesian divers have managed to retrieve both the black boxes – the flight data recorder (FDR) and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR)–of the crashed jet.

A day after having retrieved the FDR black box, the divers on Tuesday morning managed to recover the second black box as well – that is the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) – which contains the audio recordings of the conversation between the crew members and the air traffic control.

The CVR was extricated from beneath the debris of heavy wings of the plane and was on its way to Jakarta, where along with the FDR, it will be analysed, reports said.

The finding of the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) came on the17th day of the multinational search which involves nations like UK, US, France and China among others.

The retrieval of the both the black boxes is a major breakthrough in the jet search and will help a lot in understanding the cause of the crash.

Though, experts say, reading the data from both the black boxes can take a month.

According to a tweet by Malaysia’s Chief of Navy Abdul Aziz Jaafar, today's search will zero in on Most Probable Area 2, an area spanning 2.5 by 2.5 nautical miles.
Despite a major accomplishment by the searchers, out of 162 passengers, only 48 bodies have been recovered from the Java Sea so far. Since Friday, no remains of the victims have been found.

National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) confirmed that of 48 remains, 34 have been identified by the identification team.

On Monday, the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) Police Department of Republic of Indonesia (DVI POLRI) identified 2 more remains, identified as: David Gunawan (male) and Youvita Elisabeth (female). Both are Indonesian citizens.

The ill-fated Flight 8501 that went off radars just after 42 minutes of taking off, was flying to Singapore from Surabaya with 162 passengers.

Of 162 people on board the plane, there were 137 adult passengers, 17 children and one infant, along with two pilots and five crew. Majority of them were Indonesians.

The plane's pilot, Captain Iriyanto, had made a request to climb to 38,000 ft to avoid stormy clouds, however the permission was not granted as there was another plane in that route.