Indonesia: Divers found second black box from Lion air crash

The cockpit voice recorder from a Lion Air jet that crashed last October has been recovered, Indonesian authorities said on Monday, a discovery that could be critical to establishing why the brand new plane fell out of the sky shortly after take-off.

All 189 people on board died when Flight JT610 fell into the sea shortly after taking off for the short journey to Pangkal Pinang.

The pilot had asked air traffic control for permission to turn back to the airport but then contact was lost. Investigators say the plane had encountered technical problems.

The main body of the aircraft has never been found. Satmiko told that the voice recorder was found at around 09:00 local time (02:00 GMT).

Listening to the last conversations between the pilots and ground control on the CVR should help investigators to finish piecing together what went wrong in the short flight.

The first black box, the plane's flight data recorder, was found last November, buried in debris on the floor of the Java Sea.

Despite the name, black boxes are usually bright orange with reflective stripes, and all commercial planes are obliged to have them on board.

They're built to survive at vast depths and in extreme heat and are fitted with a beacon which can emit a signal for one month.

Black box data help explain nearly 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts.

Officials had said then that it could take up to six months to analyze data from the black boxes. Flight JT610 took off from Jakarta at 06:20 on Monday (23:30 GMT on Sunday).

It crashed minutes after the pilot asked for permission to turn back to the airport.

Findings by KNKT now suggest that Lion Air had put the plane back into service despite it having had problems on earlier flights.

The pilots appeared to struggle with an automated system designed to keep the plane from stalling - a new feature of the Boeing 737 Max.

The anti-stalling system repeatedly forced the plane's nose down, despite efforts by pilots to correct this.

Investigators have now said that the plane was not airworthy, and should have been grounded.