JAKARTA, Indonesia — An Indonesian official said on Tuesday that search teams had located the fuselage of the AirAsia plane that crashed in the Java Sea on Dec. 28, amid conflicting statements about whether the second of the flight’s so-called black boxes had been pulled from the water.
The fuselage was found 1.7 nautical miles from the spot where the tail section of the Airbus A320-200 was recovered on Saturday, said S.B. Supriyadi, director of operations for the National Search and Rescue Agency. The flight data recorders, which were originally housed in the tail section, were located by homing in on their automatic signals; they were found about half a mile from the tail wreckage beneath other debris from the plane, including its wings, the authorities said.
On Monday, divers recovered one of the two flight data recorders, and it was flown to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital.
On Tuesday morning, officials from the Ministry of Transportation and the National Transportation Safety Committee said divers had successfully retrieved the second recorder, the cockpit voice recorder. But Henry Bambang Soelistyo, head of the search and rescue agency, told reporters in Jakarta that he could not verify those claims, which were widely reported in both the local and international media. “We have no report yet” about the recovery of the cockpit voice recorder, he said.
Mr. Supriyadi, the agency’s director of operations, also said there was no confirmation that the voice recorder had been recovered. Speaking to reporters in the city of Pangkalan Bun, which is serving as a base for search operations, Mr. Supriyadi said the second recorder had been “sandwiched” between portions of the aircraft’s wings, about 60 feet from where the flight data recorder was retrieved.
Flight 8501 crashed less than an hour after taking off from the Indonesian city of Surabaya with 162 people aboard, bound for Singapore. As of Tuesday, search teams had recovered 48 bodies. Mr. Supriyadi said it was believed that the bodies of many missing victims from the crash remained inside the sunken fuselage.
The cause of the crash remains unclear, although weather has been cited as a probable factor. Officials have said they hope the data recorders will help explain the crash of the plane, which lost contact with ground control after requesting permission to increase altitude.
