Lion Air cockpit voice recorder found, no information on location yet: Indonesia

Indonesia has found the cockpit voice recorder from a Lion Air plane more than two months after the Boeing Co 737 MAX jet crashed into the sea near Jakarta, killing all 189 on board, an official said on Monday.

"It's been found, but we have not received information of the location yet," Haryo Satmiko, deputy chief of Indonesia's transport safety committee (KNKT), said by text message.

The cockpit voice recorder is one of the two so-called black boxes crucial for the investigation of a plane crash. The flight data recorder was retrieved three days after the crash, providing insight into aircraft systems and crew inputs, although the cause has yet to be determined.

Contact with flight JT610 was lost 13 minutes after it took off on October 29 from Jakarta heading north to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang.

The main wreckage and the CVR, one of two so-called black boxes, were not recovered in an initial search. Lion Air said in December it was funding a $2.64 million search using the offshore supply ship MPV Everest.

Lion Air's decision to foot the bill for the search is a rare test of global norms regarding search independence, as such costs are typically paid by governments.

A preliminary report by KNKT focused on airline maintenance and training and the response of a Boeing anti-stall system to a recently replaced sensor but did not give a cause for the crash.

The family of the Indonesian co-pilot of the flight filed a wrongful death lawsuit on Friday against Boeing in Chicago, adding to litigation piling up against the planemaker.

The lawsuit alleges that the Lion Air-operated Boeing 737 MAX jet was unreasonably dangerous because its sensors provided inconsistent information to both the pilots and the aircraft.

At least two other lawsuits have been filed against Boeing in Chicago by relatives of victims.