Jakarta - A dispute erupted Friday between the Indonesian government and budget carrier Adam Air over who should pay for the retrieval of the 'black box' from a commercial jetliner that crashed into the ocean on New Year's Day, killing all 102 people on board.
A US naval oceanographic ship located the black box along with a large debris field from the wreckage of the plane, which disappeared off radar screens near the eastern island of Sulawesi and either crashed into the Makassar Strait or exploded in mid-air.
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's Search and Rescue Agency doesn't have that kind of budget, so the responsibility now goes to Adam Air,' Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla was quoted as saying by the state-run Antara news agency.
Kalla also 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 needed 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 told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. 'Also, because a US ship is involved, it's an international problem.'
The USNS Mary Sears located the black box on Thursday but was scheduled to depart from Indonesian waters on Friday, according to a statement from the US embassy in Jakarta.
According to Kalla, retrieving the black box and wreckage from the plane's fuselage is possible, but not easy.
'It took almost a month just to locate it,' Kalla said.
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.
Rescue teams searched in vain for 10 days before debris began floating ashore in South Sulawesi province. No survivors or bodies have been found, although officials say fragments of human hair were recovered from one of the jetliner's headrests.
Adam Air has agreed to pay 55,000 dollars in compensation to the families of each passenger.
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.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
An example of a cockpit voice recorder.
Indonesia budget airline Adam Air has reached an agreement with United States marine salvage firm Phoenix International to retrieve the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder (or "black boxes") from Adam Air Flight 574, a Boeing 737 aircraft that crashed into the sea on New Year's Day near Sulawesi, Indonesia during a scheduled domestic passenger flight, killing all 102 on board.

According to Adam Air chairman Adam Suherman the salvage operation will be conducted in July.

Previous disputes had left doubts over whether the devices would be retrieved at all, with both the government and Adam Air placing responsibility for funding the operation on each other. Indonesia does not have the equipment or the funds to conduct the operation itself, and had originally asked Japan, France and the US for help. They eventually announced that they would not pay for the operation, neither could they force Adam Air to.
A flight data recorder.
However, Adam Air took it upon themselves to retrieve the recorders, culminating in this agreement with Phoenix. The lack of either recorder has thus far made determining the cause of the disaster extremely difficult.