Indonesia search and rescue teams hunting for the wreck of crashed AirAsia Flight QZ8501 detected “pings” in their efforts to find the black box flight recorders yesterday, an official said, 12 days after the plane went missing with 162 people on board.
The plane vanished from radar screens on Dec. 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. There were no survivors.
A total of 48 bodies, including at least two still strapped to their seats, have been found in waters off Borneo, but strong winds and high waves have hampered efforts to reach larger pieces of suspected wreckage detected by sonar on the sea floor.
The Airbus A320-200 carries the cockpit voice and flight data recorders near the tail section. However, officials said that they could have become separated from the tail.
National Transportation Safety Committee investigator Santoso Sayogo said it appeared that the flight recorders were no longer in the tail.
“We received an update from the field that the pinger locator already detected pings,” he said.
“We have our fingers crossed it is the black box. Divers need to confirm. Unfortunately it seems it is off from the tail, but the divers need to confirm the position,” he added.
The tail was found on Wednesday, upturned on the sea bed about 30km from the plane’s last known location at a depth of about 30m.
Indonesian search teams loaded lifting balloons on to helicopters yesterday ahead of an operation to raise the tail.
Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency head Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo said he assumed the flight recorders were still in the tail and that reports they had separated had yet to be confirmed.
“The divers are tying the tail with straps and then we will try [to lift it] two ways — floating balloons combined with cranes, so that the tail sector would not be damaged, because we assume the black box is in the tail sector,” he said.
He said two bodies had been found still attached to their seats, with local television reporting that one of the recovered seats was from the cockpit.
“Looking for victims is still our main priority besides the black box,” Soelistyo said.
Relatives of the victims have urged authorities to make finding the remains of their loved ones the priority.
Indonesia AirAsia, 49 percent owned by the Malaysia-based AirAsia budget group, has come under pressure from the authorities in Jakarta since the crash.
The Indonesian Ministry of Transportation has suspended the carrier’s Surabaya-Singapore license, saying it only had permission to fly the route on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
AirAsia Flight QZ8501 took off on a Sunday, though the ministry said this had no bearing on the accident.
While the cause of the crash is not known, the national weather bureau has said seasonal tropical storms common in the area were likely to be a factor.
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