A second attempt to lift the fuselage of a crashed AirAsia jetliner failed yesterday, with the wreckage returning to the seafloor when a rope linking the lifting balloons broke.
Indonesian Navy spokesman Manahan Simorangkir said the strong current in the Java Sea was the main obstacle yesterday.
He added that searchers retrieved one body during the operation. A total of 70 bodies have been retrieved from the crash.
AirAsia Flight QZ8501 on Dec. 28 last year with 162 people on board while flying from Indonesia’s second-largest city, Surabaya, to Singapore.
The first attempt on Saturday failed when some of the lifting balloons deflated.
The fuselage is believed to contain many of the victims’ bodies.
An Indonesian retrieval team lifted the fuselage almost to the water’s surface before the lifting balloons deflated on Saturday.
Four bodies were discovered near the area where dozens of divers were struggling with strong currents and poor visibility to prepare to retrieve the 30m-long section of the aircraft, Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency operations coordinator Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi said.
Divers reached the fuselage section for the first time on Friday and retrieved six bodies.
“We now need additional balloons,” Supriyadi said after Saturday’s setback.
Supriyadi added that the cockpit was reported to be about 500m from the fuselage, at a depth of 30m, and the bodies of the pilot and copilot might be inside.
“Divers would evacuate [them] if they are there,” he said.
Media reports on Saturday said that the fuselage was lifted to about 7m from the surface before some of the balloons failed.
Some passengers’ belongings, such as cookies, milk boxes, hair rollers and even an iPhone with an attached earphone, as well as aircraft parts, such as seat cushions and tables, floated out as the fuselage was being lifted, the Detik.com Web site reported.
Bad weather is a suspected factor in the crash. Just before the flight disappeared, the pilots asked to climb to a higher altitude to avoid threatening clouds, but were denied permission by air traffic controllers because of heavy air traffic.
Investigators are analyzing data from the aircraft’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders with advisers from Airbus, the aircraft’s manufacturer.
Tatang Kurniadi, head of Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, has ruled out sabotage and said that a preliminary report on the accident is expected to be submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organization next week.
A full analysis of what went wrong could take up to a year, Kurniadi said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS