While distressed relatives waited for the remains of their loved ones, searchers yesterday failed to recover the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder -- the so-called "black boxes" -- of the China Airlines plane that plunged into the sea Saturday afternoon.
They did, however, recover more bodies.
At 4:33pm Sunday, a search team detected weak but regular signals believed to be sent out by the two "black boxes," but a detailed search of an area 1km in radius around the site where the signals were detected yielded no concrete results.
"We felt quite upset today when we were no longer able to detect the signals we received the previous day," said Aviation Safety Council investigator David Lee (李寶康).
"But we will re-design the scale of our search tonight and start all over again tomorrow [Tuesday]," Lee said.
"It's possible that the signals we detected on Sunday came from ships near us rather than the two black boxes," Lee said.
If the signals detected on Sunday were from the two black boxes, the disappearance of the signals yesterday could perhaps be explained by ocean currents moving the two units, Lee added.
The two units are vital in establishing the probable cause of the airliner accident.
Lee said that it was unlikely that the two black boxes were damaged as a result of the plane crash, adding that the equipment's batteries could last up to one month.
Lee said that locating the recorders might also help in finding the main wreckage of the plane inside which bodies might still be trapped.
Vessels joining the search included two naval mine hunters, a research vessel from the Chung-shan Institute of Science and Technology (CIST) and coast guard vessels, sources said.
Penghu resident Ou Chih-yi (歐自益), who has joined the search effort together with fellow villagers on his fishing boat during the past few days, recalled that he heard an explosion between 3 and 4pm on Saturday when the crash occurred.
He was disappointed that so far his search efforts had been fruitless.
"I wish I could help recover the bodies," Ou told reporters in his hometown of Chipei islet (吉貝嶼).
Two more bodies as well as more wreckage were recovered yesterday, while relatives started to complain about the slowness of the recovery process.
A Chinese fishing boat picked up a male body around 11:30am about 90km south of the Penghu Archipelago and Taiwan's coast guard vessel took the body from the Chinese side at around 4:27pm, said Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Lin-san (林陵三) at a press conference at 7pm.
Another Chinese fishing boat also found further debris from the crashed plane, Lin said.
The second body was recovered yesterday by a fishing boat from Kaohsiung, Lin said.
The government appreciated Beijing's input into the search effort, saying the search and rescue effort should go beyond national boundaries, Lin added.
But surrounding the small stadium at a local air force base, distressed relatives found themselves frustrated by the slowness of the search effort.
"Probably the body is nowhere to be found," cried a girl from Hong Kong in Cantonese as she spoke over the phone.
Veteran actor Hung Tao (
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