(Courtesy of Dyah Jatiningrum)It wasn’t a typical day for Dyah Jatiningrum.

On May 9, the black box flight recorder analyst at the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) was working late at the lab to finish some work.

 She was in the midst of transferring her tasks to other members of the team and was planning to go on sabbatical leave to continue her studies in the Netherlands, pursuing a doctoral degree on aerospace engineering at the Delft University of Technology.

But at 7 p.m., her plan for the night changed. KNKT chief Tatang Kurniadi told her that a Russian-made aircraft had gone missing over Mt. Salak near Bogor in West Java. All four KNKT flight recorder analysts assembled and began to prepare for their next big assignment — the investigation of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft that had crashed and killed all 45 people onboard while on a flight from Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in Jakarta.

It took a few days before rescue workers retrieved the black box from the plane’s wreckage at the bottom of the cliff, but a row had already developed between Indonesia and Russia about who should lead the investigation, and more
importantly, who got to break up and analyze the flight and voice data recorders.

Indonesia prevailed, first because international law said that the host nation where the plane had crashed should lead the investigation, and secondly, because Indonesia had the capacity to conduct its own investigation through the KNKT.

The team of black box analysts is a very important part of the KNKT. Dyah, or Ajenk as friends and colleagues call her, is the only woman in the team, and also the first and only woman to hold the job in Southeast Asia.

Although working behind the scenes, the pressure on the KNKT and the black box analysts was no less intense given the strong public pressure for the government to come up with a verdict on the cause of the crash.

Ajenk said she did not allow herself to get emotional when she worked at the lab, even though she could get attached to the task at hand.

“Accidents are unpredictable, there’s a lot of crying and shouting going on,” Ajenk says. “I try to stay focused on my work as best as possible until the investigation is completed,” she said in an interview with The Jakarta Post recently.

Spending hours reading tons of flight data or listening to the voice recorder within the cockpit and with the control tower could also be overwhelming, she said. “If there’s spare time, I use it either for reading, playing basketball, jogging or swimming.”

Born in Madiun, East Java, on Sept. 3, 1979, the back box analyst profession is the closest Ajenk could get to fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut.

She fell in love with airplanes when she was in the third grade of elementary school. “I became interested in airplanes after reading an article about the Concorde aircraft in a children’s magazine,” she reminisced.

After finishing school, she attended the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and graduated in 2004, majoring in aerospace engineering. She joined the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) a year later. She went back to her alma mater in Bandung to pursue her Master’s degree in 2008.

With her educational and professional background, she joined the KNKT’s first team of black box analysts in 2009.

As part of the preparations, she underwent a seven-month training program at the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau (ATSB), where she got her first experience of reading a flight recorder, commonly referred to as a black box.

There was never any shortage of work for her and the team after their return from Australia, given the frequency of plane accidents in Indonesia.

The first black box Ajenk analyzed was of a Boeing 737 MD aircraft, owned by Merpati Airline, which crash-landed on the airport runway in Manokwari, Papua, in 2010. Since then, she has analyzed around 20 cases of plane accidents in Indonesia.

“Every case has different challenges and experiences,” Ajenk said.

She says her most memorable experience was working on the flight recorders of the plane that sank into the waters in Kaimana, off Papua, in 2011.

On one side, the public and media’s focus on the accident forced the investigation team prioritize the case. But on the other hand, Ajenk says this attention made the work easier because the supporting data and equipment the team required was provided within a week.

“In fact, this type of aircraft and recorder was the first we handled,” she said.

The investigation process took approximately a year, and the report was released on May 7.

Before the formation of her team in 2010, Indonesia had to send every black box of a plane crash to either the plane manufacturer or the airline.

This meant that not only did investigations take longer, but also that the KNKT lost control, or the lead role, in the investigation.

“Fortunately for us, the KNKT has kept on developing its tools and the software required to download the data of every black box to beef up our own capacity,” Ajenk said.

Now, the KNKT can read almost all recorders.

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