|
 Officials said more than 20 bodies have now 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.
"The waves could reach five meters this afternoon. Higher than
yesterday," said air force Puma helicopter pilot Flight Captain
Tatag Onne, who has been flying missions to recover bodies and
debris from the sea.
"We look for breaks in the clouds where conditions improve so that
we can approach. Yesterday, when we went to collect a body from the
sea we couldn't because the body was being rolled by waves.
Sometimes we could see it, sometimes we couldn't."
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.
"The sea state has to be calm," General Sunarbowo Sandi of
Indonesia's search and rescue agency said. "We cannot operate it in
poor weather."
But naval vessels from Indonesia, the United States and Singapore
with in-built anti-submarine capabilities were using sonar to sweep
the sea floor, he added.
STALL THEORY
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.
Even in bad weather, however, the search for the AirAsia plane is
less technically challenging than the two-year search for an Air
France jet that crashed into deep Atlantic waters in 2009, or the
fruitless hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 that disappeared
last year.
Given Flight QZ8501 crashed in shallow seas, experts say finding the
boxes should not be difficult if its locator beacons, with a range
of 2,000 to 3,000 meters (6,560 to 9,800 ft) and a battery life of
about 30 days, are working.
Twenty-two bodies have been recovered from the sea, Supriadi,
mission co-ordinator for the Indonesian search and rescue agency,
told a news conference. Debris such as luggage, an emergency slide
and a life jacket has also been found.
The bodies are being taken in numbered coffins to Surabaya, where
relatives of the victims, most of whom were Indonesian, have
gathered. Authorities have been collecting DNA from relatives to
help identify the bodies.
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The first funeral one of the crash victims was held on Thursday, and
on Friday officials said the remains of three more had been
identified, including a flight attendant.
"UNBELIEVABLY" STEEP CLIMB
The plane was traveling at 32,000 ft (9,753 meters) and the pilots
had asked to climb to 38,000 ft to avoid bad weather just before
contact was lost. When air traffic controllers granted permission to
fly at 34,000 ft a few minutes later, they got no response.
A source close to the investigation said radar data appeared to show
the aircraft made an "unbelievably" steep climb before it crashed,
possibly pushing it beyond the A320's limits.
"It appears to be beyond the performance envelope of the aircraft,"
he said.
Online discussion among pilots has centered on unconfirmed secondary
radar data from Malaysia that suggested the aircraft was climbing at
a speed of 353 knots, about 100 knots too slow, and that it might
have stalled.
The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100
flying hours on the A320 and the plane last underwent maintenance in
mid-November, according to Indonesia AirAsia, which is 49 percent
owned by Malaysia-based AirAsia.
Three airline disasters involving Malaysian-affiliated carriers in
less than a year have dented confidence in the country's aviation
industry and spooked travelers.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in March en route from
Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew and has not
been found. On July 17, the same airline's Flight MH17 was shot down
over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans,
and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The
co-pilot was French.
(Additional reporting by Charlotte Greenfield, Cindy Silviana,
Michael Taylor, Nilufar Rizki, Kanupriya Kapoor, Nicholas Owen,
Adriana Nina Kusuma in JAKARTA, Jane Wardell in SYDNEY and Anshuman
Daga in SINGAPORE; Writing by Jane Wardell and Alex Richardson;
Editing by Michael Perry, Paul Tait, Robert Birsel)
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