Adam Air strikes deal with salvage firm to retrieve black boxes of crashed airliner

May 29, 2007 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. 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.