Divers recover more AirAsia bodies
January 22, 2015
Divers were struggling against rough weather and strong poor visibility to lift the fuselage and what appears to be the plane's cockpit from the seabed at a depth of 30 meters (100 feet).
"It's very dark down there, visibility is limited. However we still predict we can evacuate all the bodies from there," Rear Admiral Widodo, commander of the navy's western fleet, told reporters aboard the warship KRI Banda Aceh. He added rescuers expected to attach giant air bags to the fuselage to lift it to the surface by Friday.
AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes welcomed the news. "This is so important to all of us at AirAsia so we can return our guests to their loved ones," Fernandes wrote on Twitter.
A multinational search and rescue operation has recovered 59 bodies so far and located both "black box" flight recorders, which should provide clues as to why the plane crashed.
Final report within a year
Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather on December 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore. There were no survivors among the 162 people on board the Airbus A320.
Data received by air traffic control showed the aircraft climbing too fast, which caused it to stall, before crashing into the Java Sea.
Indonesian transport minister Ignasius Jonan confirmed earlier this week that the plane had climbed abnormally fast at a rate of about 6,000 feet a minute, then dropped rapidly and disappeared.
Jonan told a parliamentary hearing that the pilots asked to climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet to avoid threatening clouds and were denied permission to do so because of heavy high-altitude traffic.
The exact cause of AirAsia's first fatal crash is not yet known, but the head of the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) Tatang Kurniadi ruled out sabotage, as investigators downloaded and began analyzing data from the aircraft's cockpit voice and flight data recorders.
The final report on the investigation, which will be made public, must be filed within a year.
jil/ipj (AP, Reuters, dpa)