Crew members of Crest onyx ship prepare to unload parts of AirAshia Flight 8501 in Pangkalan Bun, Sunday (Photo: Achmad Ibrahim, AP)
Monday, January 12, 2015
Divers have found both of the black boxes from the AirAsia flight that crashed more than two weeks ago into the Java Sea and have brought one of them to the surface, an Indonesia official says.
Henry Bambang Soelistyo, chief of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, told reporters the flight data recorder was brought to the surface by four divers early Monday morning.
Divers found the second black box, the cockpit voice recorder, just hours after the retrieval of the flight data recorder was announced, Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi, operation coordinator at the national search and rescue agency, said.
The cockpit voice recorder is wedged under heavy pieces of wreckage and divers are working to free it, Supriyadi said.
Underwater searchers began to hone in on the two important pieces of equipment after hearing pings from the devices Sunday, but their efforts 100 feet beneath the surface were thwarted by murky conditions and heavy currents.
The recovery of the black boxes is key to determining what caused the Dec. 28 crash of the Airbus A320 with 162 people aboard less than an hour into its scheduled two-hour flight from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Indonesian weather service officials have tentatively blamed storms for the crash.
On Sunday divers confirmed a large piece of debris detected by sonar was a wing and pieces from the engine.
On Saturday, the tail of the plane was lifted from the sea floor and taken to Pangkalan Bun, the nearest town, to be handed over to Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee for investigation, the airline said in a statement.
Some 48 bodies have been recovered so far, the National Search and Rescue Agency said in a statement Sunday. AirAsia said 32 of the remains have been identified.
Indonesian transport ministry has said AirAsia did not have a license to fly the route on the day of the crash, a claim AirAsia has vigorously disputed. The airline has been banned from flying the Surabaya-Singapore route. The transport ministry has suspended scores of routes from other domestic airlines for similar alleged violations.
Contributing: William M. Welch, John Bacon and Jane Onyanga-Omara, USA TODAY; The Associated Press
Source: USA Today