A body recovered yesterday from the crashed AirAsia plane was wearing a life jacket, an Indonesian search-and-rescue official said, raising new questions about how the disaster unfolded.
Rescuers believe they have found the plane on the ocean floor off Borneo, after sonar detected a large, dark object beneath waters near where debris and bodies were found on the surface.
Ships and planes scoured the Java Sea for Flight QZ8501 since Sunday, when it lost contact during bad weather about 40 minutes into its flight from the Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore.
Photo: Reuters
Seven bodies have been recovered from the sea, some fully clothed, which could indicate the Airbus A320-200 was intact when it hit the water. That would support a theory that it suffered an aerodynamic stall.
Two bodies in coffins bedecked with flowers and marked 001 and 002 arrived by an air force plane in Surabaya, TV footage showed.
That one person put on a life jacket suggests that those on board had time before the aircraft hit the water, or before it sank, but the pilots did not issue a distress signal. The plane disappeared after it asked for permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather.
AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes said there had been no confirmation yet of the sonar image, nor of the discovery of the body wearing a life jacket.
A pilot who works for a Gulf carrier said the life jacket indicated the cause of the crash was not “catastrophic failure.” Instead, the plane could have stalled and then come down, possibly because its instruments iced up and gave the pilots inaccurate readings.
“There was time. It means the thing didn’t just fall out of the sky,” said the pilot, who declined to be identified.
He said it could take a minute for a plane to come down from 30,000 feet (9,144m) and the pilots could have experienced “tunnel vision ... too overloaded” to send a distress call.
Most of those on board were Indonesians. No survivors have been found.
Hernanto, head of the search-and-rescue agency in Surabaya, said rescuers believed they had found the plane on the sea bed with a sonar scan in water 30m to 50m deep. The black-box flight data and cockpit voice recorder has yet to be found.
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