The investigation into the AirAsia crash has turned to the ocean floor, with more sonar equipment and metal detectors deployed yesterday to scour the seabed for wreckage, including the plane’s black boxes.
Sixteen bodies have been recovered, including seven yesterday, six of which were found by a US Navy ship.
A helicopter from the USS Sampson took the corpses to Pangkalan Bun, the town nearest to the site. They were unloaded and driven off in ambulances.
Photo: Reuters
Rescuers hope the fuselage — if intact — will contain the remains of many of the nearly 150 passengers and crew still missing. The wreckage will be key to explaining what might have caused AirAsia Flight QZ8501 to go down.
The Airbus A320 smashed into the Java Sea on Sunday, halfway into a flight from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, to Singapore. Minutes earlier, the pilot told air traffic control he was approaching threatening clouds, but was denied permission to climb to a higher altitude because of heavy air traffic.
More ships arrived at the scene yesterday with sensitive equipment to hunt for the plane’s fuselage.
“We will focus on underwater detection,” Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo said.
He added that ships from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the US had been on the scene since before dawn yesterday to try to pinpoint wreckage, as well as the all-important flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
The data recorder contains crucial information such as engine temperature, vertical and horizontal speed and hundreds of other measurements. The voice recorder captures conversations between the pilots and other sounds coming from the cockpit.
Toos Saniotoso, an Indonesian air safety investigator, said investigators “are looking at every aspect” as they try to determine why the plane crashed.
“From the operational side, the human factor, the technical side, the ATC [air traffic control] — everything is valuable to us,” he said.
Soelistyo said bad weather, which has hindered the search for the past several days, remained a worry. A drizzle and light clouds covered the area yesterday morning, but rain, strong winds and high waves of up to 4m were forecast until tomorrow. Strong sea currents have also kept debris moving.
Nine planes, many with metal detecting equipment, were also scouring a 13,500km2 area off Pangkalan Bun. Two Japanese ships with three helicopters were on their way, Soelistyo said.
Soelistyo estimated that the fuselage was at a depth of 25m to 30m.
Indonesian Vice Air Marshal Sunarbowo Sandi said before boarding a Hercules C-130 yesterday that as soon as the wreckage is found, divers will be sent down to recover the passengers and crew.
Soelistyo vowed to recover the bodies of “our brothers and sisters... whatever conditions we face.”
So far, one victim of the crash has been returned to her family — the first of many painful reunions to come. Hayati Lutfiah Hamid’s identity was confirmed by fingerprints and other means, Colonel Budiyono of East Java’s Disaster Victim Identification Unit said.
Yesterday was the holiest day of the week for Muslims. After prayers, more than 200 Muslims held a short prayer session for the AirAsia victims at a mosque next to the Surabaya police hospital where bodies were being kept.
“We pray that the passengers in this AirAsia tragedy will be received by Allah and that all their sins will be forgiven by Allah,” the imam said.
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