Thomas Maresca

Special to USA TODAY

An Indonesian search team has recovered one of the black boxes from the Lion Air jet that crashed into the Java Sea on Monday, killing all 189 people on board, authorities said. It came as the first victim to be identified was buried.

The box was found Thursday morning in waters off Tanjung Karawang, West Java, by divers from the National Search and Rescue Agency.

TV footage showed divers bringing a bright orange device to the surface and loading it into a container that was transferred onto a ship.

Bambang Irawan, an investigator with the National Transport Safety Commission, said that the retrieved box was the flight data recorder, and that the search for the cockpit voice recorder was ongoing.

“We will process the data contained in this FDR (flight data recorder) as part of the investigation process to find out the cause of the crash,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “We cannot say how long it takes to process data in a black box, but of course we will try as soon as possible.”

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The flight was bound for the city of Pangkal Pinang on Bangka – Indonesia's ninth-largest island – when it lost contact. The flight data recorder was recovered from a depth of 98 feet about 1,640 feet northwest from where it disappeared, authorities said.

Navy Col. Monang Sitompul told local TV that what is believed to be the plane's fuselage was also spotted on the sea floor, AP reported.

The recovery of the black box will be the first step toward discovering why the Lion Air jet, a brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8, plunged into the Java Sea just minutes after taking off from Jakarta. Its pilot had requested clearance to return to the airport just minutes minutes after takeoff, which aviation experts said indicated a technical problem.

The funeral took place Thursday for Jannatun Cintya Dewi, 24, whose remains were identified the previous day, in East Java. Her father and other mourners knelt by her flower-adorned grave to pray, AP reported.

Other families are facing a longer wait to bury their relatives - police medical experts said the DNA tests needed for identification will take 4-8 days in many cases, AP added.

Data from flight-tracking sites showed erratic speed, altitude and direction in the minutes after takeoff on the plane’s previous flight on Sunday.

Passengers on the Sunday flight from Bali to Jakarta recounted problems that included a long delay before takeoff for an engine check and the plane dropping suddenly several times in the first minutes of its flight.

The president of Lion Air, Edward Sirait, told reporters Monday that the plane had a technical issue on its previous flight but said it had been resolved according to the manufacturer’s procedures. He did not provide specific details on that incident.

A similar pattern was seen in data pinged from Monday’s fatal flight. Safety experts cautioned, however, that the data must be checked for accuracy against the plane’s black boxes.

Contributing: Jane Onyanga-Omara