Hunt for crashed Jet's cockpit recorder stymied by lack of tools

A delay in securing equipment needed to find recordings of the pilots’ final conversations on the doomed Lion Air jet is hampering Indonesian authorities search for clues to the nation’s worst air disaster in two decades. The National Transportation Safety Committee expects to resume Sunday the search for the cockpit voice recorder of the Boeing 737 Max jet, which crashed Oct. 29 in the Java Sea off Jakarta, Deputy Chairman Haryo Satmiko said Wednesday. The agency will deploy a sub-bottom profiling system along with a remotely operated vehicle with side scan sonar to scour the site of the crash. The crew was previously scheduled to resume the search on Thursday but the shipment of the sub-bottom profiling system from Singapore was delayed, according to Soerjanto Tjahjono, chairman of the safety committee. Indonesian investigators have warned that the pinger of the cockpit voice recorder may have broken off from the device due to the impact from the crash. “Whatever equipment we have been using in the past are no longer useful as the pings are no longer there,” Tjahjono said by phone Wednesday. “We have to use new technique to basically scour the seabed.” <br/>