| Battle between Adam Airline and Indonesian government over retrieval charges of the black box |
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| World Affairs Talk | |
| Wednesday, 07 March 2007 | |
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The wreckage is hundreds of metres beneath the ocean's surface and it will likely take a remote-controlled underwater robot to retrieve the black box, which contains voice recordings of the Adam Air flight's pilots and could provide clues as to why it went down. Indonesia sought help from the United States, France and Japan in this regard. Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said that 'Indonesia's Search and Rescue Agency doesn't have that kind of budget, so the responsibility now goes to Adam Air,'. Kalla in addition questioned the need to even retrieve the black box given that no one survived the crash. However, Pring Saputra, managing-director of Adam Air, said the black box needs to be recovered and the government should pay for the operation, though it was unclear who would carry it out. 'It is the responsibility of the Indonesian government because it's now a national problem,' Saputra said. 'Also, because a US ship is involved, it's an international problem.' According to Kalla, retrieving the black box and wreckage from the plane's fuselage is possible, but not easy. Adam Air Flight KI-574 was carrying 96 passengers including three US citizens and a crew of six when it disappeared during a scheduled flight from Surabaya, the capital of East Java province, to Manado, the capital of North Sulawesi province, on January 1. Adam Air has agreed to pay 55,000 dollars in compensation to the families of each passenger. Rescue teams searched in vain for 10 days before debris began floating ashore in South Sulawesi province. No survivors or bodies have been found. Adam Air is one of dozens of budget carriers to spring up in Indonesia following the deregulation of the domestic aviation industry in 1999. A series of crashes and accidents involving those carriers has raised concerns about safety and maintenance practices; though in 2006, Adam Air received a Merit Award for Low Cost Airline of the Year from the Centre of Asia Pacific Aviation. In February 2006, an Adam Air flight from Jakarta to Makassar went off course and requested emergency clearance for landing in East Nusa Tenggara. Suspicions rose that the plane had faulty navigational equipment, but this suspicions could not be confirmed. The disaster has focused attention on the shoddy state of the transport infrastructure in Indonesia and in particular over safety regulations after a host of no-frills budget airlines sprang up in the past few years. From the passenger’s point of view, as long as flight safety is not compromised, they will continue flying low cost carriers. Adam Air and others should now fully concentrate on the safety but one can be sure that flight transport will be regulated more strictly by the Indonesian government from now on and hopefully, passengers will no longer have to worry about their own safety. -End- Share & Bookmark             |
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