Indonesia keeps up search for crashed jet's black box as signal drops out

Indonesia is still trying to find the cockpit voice recorder from a Lion Air jet that crashed into the sea near Jakarta last month, even though its “ping” signal is no longer being detected, a transport safety panel said on Thursday. The nearly new Boeing 737 MAX passenger plane crashed into the sea on Oct. 29, just minutes after taking off from Jakarta en route to an island off Sumatra, killing all 189 on board. Authorities have downloaded data from one of the black boxes found days after the crash, the flight data recorder, but are still looking for the cockpit voice recorder. “We’re still putting in all our efforts to find the CVR (cockpit voice recorder),” Soerjanto Tjahjono, the chief of Indonesia’s National Transport Safety Committee (KNKT), told parliament on Thursday. The search team was targeting an area with a radius of 300 metres using sonar and dredging mud from the sea floor, even though a signal initially heard from the recorder was now not being detected, he said. Efforts to find the second black box have been hampered by strong currents and complicated by the presence of energy pipelines in the area. Boeing has already provided two updates for operators around the world that re-emphasize existing procedures to deal with situations relating to the system. KNKT is due to announce next Wednesday the preliminary results of its investigation into the crash.<br/>