Pangkalan Bun // Search teams looking for the crashed AirAsia jet recovered four more bodies and a fifth plane fragment on Sunday as the hunt continued for the black box that could explain the accident’s cause.
Early analysis shows the plane may have flown into a storm cloud, as poor weather conditions were difficult to avoid on the flight’s path, researchers from the Indonesia weather office said in a report. Operations of the jet’s engine may have been affected by “icing,” they said, citing meteorological data from the plane’s last known location.
Indonesia has suspended AirAsia flights on the route pending an investigation, saying the carrier wasn’t authorised to fly from Surabaya to Singapore on the day of the accident. Meanwhile, divers, helicopters, planes and ships are scouring the Java Sea for the plane’s fuselage and black box, which could help explain why the six-year-old aircraft on a routine commercial flight crashed on December 28 with 162 people on board.
“Our main task is still to find objects underwater, including the black box, as well as recovering both victims’ bodies and suspected plane debris,” head of Indonesia’s search and rescue, Bambang Sulistyo, said on Sunday. “We’ve tried to dive, but the weather is still unfriendly.”
The bodies of three men and one woman were recovered on Sunday, bringing the total to 34, Mr Sulistyo said. The fifth piece of plane debris recovered measures 9.8 metres long and 1.1 metres wide.
The Indonesian navy has also found bodies still strapped in their seats and debris resembling parts of the tail, Colonel Yayan Sofyan said on Saturday. The tail is the location for the flight-data recorder, which together with the cockpit-voice recorder is known as the black box.
Search teams deploying sonar and pinger locators to seek the black box are being slowed by heavy seas and strong winds. The box, which is encased in bright orange to facilitate retrieval, is waterproof, fortified and designed to emit an electronic signal underwater for 30 days to help searchers find it.
Recovery efforts are focused near Pangkalan Bun, a town on Borneo in Indonesia, about 1,000 kilometres south-east of Singapore. The international team set 1,575 square nautical miles as the most likely area to find the wreckage, Malaysian navy chief Abdul Aziz Jaafar said on Saturday in a Twitter post.
AirAsia Indonesia CEO, Sunu Widyatmoko, said on Saturday that the carrier will cooperate with the investigation but won’t issue a statement until the results of the government review are announced.
Flying at 32,000 feet, the pilot asked to move to a higher altitude, citing clouds, officials have said.
An “abnormal situation [then] occurred” at that height, said AirNav Indonesia, the nation’s air-navigation operator. Air traffic control gave the plane permission to ascend to 34,000 feet after checking flights in the area and coordinating with other airports, AirNav’s head, Bambang Tjahjono, said on Saturday.
More than 90 vessels and aircraft have been involved in the search operation, which has so far found objects including what appears to be an emergency door and an evacuation slide.
The recovery effort will involve salvaging large pieces of the plane, engines, landing gear and other wreckage requiring heavy-duty lifting capability. The parts will then be pieced together for the investigation. Indonesia has sent a tanker to help.
Flight 8501 was the third high-profile incident involving a carrier in Asia last year, raising safety concerns in one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets. AirAsia is the biggest customer by units of the A320, a workhorse airliner flown by hundreds of carriers globally.
A spate of crashes in the 2000s prompted Indonesia to amend laws and boost plane-safety checks in 2008 after the European Union banned its carriers from flying to Europe. The ban was later partially lifted.
* Bloomberg
