Advances in salvage of AirAsia wreckage
January 9, 2015
Indonesian authorities announced on Friday that possible signals had been detected from the wreckage of AirAsia flight QZ8501 that went missing on December 28.
The pings picked up were hoped to be emanating from the flight's black box recorder, which is believed to have been separated as the plane crashed into the Java Sea.
"We detected signals about 1 km away from the location of the tail," search and rescue agency coordinator Supriyadi told reporters in Pangkalan Bun, the southern Borneo town closest to the crash site.
"Reports from the field confirm that pings are from the black box, because once the search team were out of a 500 meter range, they could no longer hear it," he added.
"Tomorrow we will continue searching by air. We will add ships to the search. We will deploy divers to investigate more objects that have been detected but not yet identified."
Tail recovered
The tail was found on Wednesday, upturned on the shallow seabed about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the last known location of the Airbus A320-200.
Stormy weather and strong currents have slowed multinational recovery efforts to recover the remains of the 162 passengers and crew on board. So far, 48 bodies have been found in waters off Borneo.
The AirAsia flight vanished from radar screens on December 28, less that half way into a two-hour flight from Surabaya on the Indonesian island of Java to Singapore. The plane vanished four minutes after its pilots had asked to climb from 32,000 feet (9,753 meters) to a higher cruising altitude to avoid storm clouds.
Cockpit voice and flight data recorders, if recovered intact, should provide investigators with key data to assess the cause of the disaster.
sb/ksb (Reuters, dpa, AFP)