This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Indonesian Navy divers have found a black box and a piece of landing gear from the Lion Air plane that plunged into the Java Sea on Monday morning, killing all 189 people on board.

Divers lifted the flight data recorder from the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft onto their ship on Thursday morning, the fourth day of the search, after narrowing the area since yesterday. They are still looking for the cockpit voice recorder. The piece of landing gear was retrieved later in the day.

Officials say they don’t believe anyone on the new aircraft flying from Jakarta to the island of Bangka survived the crash into the Java Sea on Monday. Ground staff lost touch with Lion Air flight JT610 13 minutes after it took off.

Indonesian Navy diver Sertu Hendra told local news portal Detik.com his team had followed the “pings” or signals from the devices until they able to determine the exact location. “We followed the tool, reducing the area in the place the tools were picking up sounds, and it turns out we got the black box,” he said.

The search for the devices, believed to be the key to determining why the new plane crashed, was initially hampered by strong sea currents.

Kompas TV reported the black box had been collected by the Baruna Jaya ship assisting in the search operation.

Indonesian police have identified the first victim of the crash.The passenger has been named as Jannatun Cintya Dewi, a 24-year-old woman from Sidoarjo, East Java, and a civil servant for the energy ministry in Jakarta.

Highlighting the gruesome nature of the task, Brigadier-General Hudi Suryanto, in charge of the Automatic Finger Print Identification System (INAFIS), said investigators had identified the first victim on the third day of the search after finding her right hand.

The forensic team ran a fingerprint check, which matched data from Indonesia’s national ID card system. The results were then crosschecked with documents and photos provided by the victim’s family.

“We’ve examined 48 body bags of victim remains and we could identify one victim through primary identification, which is fingerprints and dental records,” Suryanto told reporters.

The disaster victim identification team has taken 152 DNA samples from the families to help identify the victims, with devastated family members flocking to the hospital to hand over toothbrushes, dental records and photographs of their loved ones to assist in the process.

Lion Air plane 'flew erratically the day before it crashed' Read more

Search and rescue teams, including a team of specialised divers, scoured the waters off Java for the plane fuselage on Thursday morning, the fourth day of the search.

The search and rescue agency chief, Muhammad Syaugi, said the currents were so strong they had shifted a large ship, and that efforts were further complicated by oil and gas pipelines in the vicinity.

Syaugi said he believed the fuselage was located 32 metres down, 400 metres north-west of where the plane had lost contact. If found, the fuselage would be lifted using a crane, because many bodies were likely to be trapped inside, he said.

The accident is the first to be reported involving the widely sold Boeing 737 MAX, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer’s single-aisle jet.

The plane’s black boxes, as the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are known, should help to explain why the almost-new jet went down minutes after take-off.

As the media speculated about the airworthiness of the aircraft, the transport minister suspended the budget airline’s technical director and several technicians to facilitate the crash investigation.

According to KNKT, the plane had technical problems on its previous flight on Sunday, from the city of Denpasar on the resort island of Bali, including an “unreliable airspeed” issue.

Lion Air, which was founded in 1999 and is privately owned, said the aircraft had been in operation since August, had been airworthy and that the pilot and co-pilot had 11,000 hours of flying time between them.

The airline’s chief executive, Edward Sirait, has acknowledged reports of technical problems with the aircraft, but said maintenance had been carried out “according to procedure” before it was cleared to fly again.

Investigators are looking into why the pilot had asked to return to base shortly after takeoff, a request that ground control officials granted shortly before the crash.