The cockpit voice recorder of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft that crashed into a mountain in Indonesia on 9 May has been recovered.
The voice recorder was retrieved on 15 May, six days after the crash, because of the "difficult terrain" investigators and search teams had to navigate through, says Mardjono Siswosuwarno, the case's chief investigator from Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC).
The recorder will be sent to Jakarta for analysis and efforts will now be put into locating the aircraft's flight data recorder, which will provide more details on the aircraft's performance parameters during the flight.
The NTSC will be leading the investigation on the case, says a senior NTSC official.
Should the flight data recorder be recovered, however, it may have to be sent to Russia for playback analysis as Jakarta may not have the technology to do so, he adds.
The aircraft was on its second demonstration flight of the day when the incident occurred. Radar contact with the aircraft was lost at 14:33 local time, 12 minutes after take-off from Jakarta's Halim Perdana Kusuma Airport.
Just before contact was lost, the pilot had also requested for permission from the air traffic control to descend from 10,000ft (3,048 metres) to 6,000ft.
None of the 45 people on board the aircraft survived.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
