Bad weather hinders wreckage hunt, 30 more bodies found

PANGKALAN BUN/SURABAYA: Ships and aircraft criss-crossed the seas off Borneo on Friday hunting for the wreck of an Indonesia AirAsia passenger jet, but bad weather again hindered the search for the plane and the black box flight recorders that should reveal why it crashed.

An official said 30 bodies had been recovered, along with pieces of the broken-up plane, in the Indonesian-led search for Flight QZ8501 that is concentrated on 1,575 square nautical miles of the northern Java Sea.

Strong winds and heavy seas have stopped divers from looking for the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which plunged into the water on Sunday while en route from Indonesia's second-biggest city Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board.

"Waves were between three and four metres on Friday, making it difficult to load bodies onto ships and between ships," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, told reporters in Jakarta, adding that some vessels would search through the night.

"Tonight we are sending tug boats which should make the (body) transfers easier."

He said two of the 30 bodies found were strapped to their plane seats.

The multinational search operation based in Pangkalan Bun, the town in southern Borneo closest to the search area, was bolstered on Friday by experts from France's BEA accident investigation agency, which attends all Airbus crashes. Officials said the French team's hydrophones — sophisticated underwater acoustic detection devices — and towed sonar equipment brought by other international experts could not be used on Friday because of high waves.

But naval vessels from Indonesia, the US and Singapore with in-built anti-submarine capabilities were using sonar to sweep the sea floor.

The cause of the crash, the first suffered by the AirAsia group since the budget operator began flying in 2002, is unexplained. Investigators are working on a theory that the plane stalled as it climbed steeply to avoid a storm about 40 minutes into a flight that should have lasted two hours.

Officials earlier said it may take up to a week to find the black boxes, which investigators hope will unravel the sequence of events in the cockpit during the doomed jet's final minutes. "After the black box is found, we are able to issue a preliminary report in one month," said Toos Sanitioso, an investigator with the National Committee for Transportation Safety. "We cannot yet speculate what caused the crash."

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