(MENAFN- The Peninsula) A military vessel yesterday located the fuselage of the AirAsia passenger jet that crashed more than two weeks ago off the coast of Indonesia, raising hopes that more bodies will be found.
The fuselage, the part of the plane that holds pilots and passengers, was discovered around 3km from where the tail of the aircraft was retrieved last weekend at the bottom of the Java Sea, Indonesian officials said.
"A marker was placed on the engine. Beside the engine is the fuselage, the wing and a lot of debris," Ony Soeryo Wibowo, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Committee, said. So far 50 bodies, of the 162 killed, have been plucked from the Java Sea, with most brought to Surabaya for identification. Searchers believe more bodies will be found in the plane's fuselage. Divers will check the wreckage for bodies today, said Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of the National Search and Rescue Agency.
Indonesian investigators started examining the black box flight recorders recovered from the Airbus A320-200, and hope to unlock initial clues to the cause of the disaster within days. Divers retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders this week from the plane's sunken wreckage.
The recorders were lifted from the bottom of the Java Sea and sent to the capital, Jakarta, for analysis. Both were found to be in relatively good condition. "In one week, I think we will be getting a reading," Mardjono Siswosuwarno, head investigator for the National Transportation Safety Committee, said.
The so-called black boxes - which are actually orange - contain a wealth of data that will be crucial for investigators piecing together the sequence of events that led to the plane plunging into the sea. The flight data recorder took only 15 minutes to download, but investigators will now need to analyse up to 25 hours of data and several thousand flight parameters covering things such as flying speed, altitude, fuel consumption, air pressure changes and inputs to the aircraft controls.
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