Search teams looking for the crashed AirAsia Bhd. (AIRA) jetliner found four more bodies and another plane fragment as the hunt continued for the black box that could unlock the cause of the accident.
An early analysis shows the AirAsia plane may have flown into a storm cloud, as inclement conditions were difficult to avoid on the flight’s path, researchers from the Indonesia weather office wrote in a report. Operations of the jet’s engine may have been affected by “icing,” it 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 authorized to fly from Surabaya to Singapore on the day of the accident. Divers, helicopters, planes and ships are scouring the Java Sea for the Airbus Group NV (AIR) plane’s fuselage and black box, which could help explain why the six-year-old aircraft on a routine commercial flight crashed on Dec. 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,” Bambang Sulistyo, head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, told reporters in Jakarta today. “We’ve tried to dive, but the weather is still unfriendly.”
The search team recovered one body from the ocean today, bringing the total to 31, according to Sulistyo. It also discovered a fifth piece of plane debris, measuring 9.8 meters (32 feet) long and 1.1 meters wide, he said.
A U.S. Navy helicopter separately spotted three bodies at sea this morning, which have not yet been recovered because of strong winds, Major Setiawan of the Indonesian Air Force told reporters in Pangkalan Bun. Like many Indonesians, Setiawan goes by only one name.
AirAsia Indonesia Chief Executive Officer Sunu Widyatmoko confirmed the route suspension and said the carrier will cooperate with the investigation, according to comments made at a press conference broadcast on local television yesterday. The company won’t issue a statement until the results of the government review are announced, he said.
Black Box
The Indonesian navy has found bodies still strapped in their seats and debris resembling parts of the tail, Colonel Yayan Sofyan in an interview on Metro TV yesterday. 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, about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) southeast of Singapore. The international team set 1,575 square nautical miles (5,400 square kilometers) as the most likely area to find the wreckage, Malaysian Navy Chief Abdul Aziz Jaafar said yesterday in a Twitter post.
In-flight Breakup
The fact that some of the bodies were recovered wearing seat belts suggests the plane may have suffered an aerodynamic stall rather than an in-flight breakup at high altitudes, said Robert Mann, head of aviation consultant R.W. Mann & Co. in Port Washington, New York.
Flying at 32,000 feet, the pilot asked to move to a higher altitude, citing clouds, officials have said.
An “abnormal situation 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, Bambang Tjahjono, AirNav’s head, said yesterday.
Recovery Effort
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, Sulistyo said.
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 past decade prompted Indonesia in 2008 to amend laws and boost plane-safety checks after the European Union banned its carriers from flying to Europe. The ban was later partially lifted. Indonesia had 3.77 fatal accidents for every 1 million takeoffs in the three years ended March 31, London-based aviation adviser Ascend said in 2007. The global rate was 0.25 then.
