|
 The fuselage, the part of the plane that holds pilots and
passengers, was discovered around 3 kilometers 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, told
Reuters.
Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic
control in bad weather on Dec. 28, less than halfway into a two-hour
flight from the city of Surabaya to Singapore. All 162 people on
board were killed.
So far 50 bodies 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 on Thursday, said
Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of the National Search and Rescue
Agency.
 Indonesian investigators started examining on Wednesday 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 (NTSC), told Reuters.
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 analyze 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 aircrafts controls.
[to top of second column] |
"We are feeling relieved but there is still a lot of work ahead of
us to analyze it," said Siswosuwarno.
Investigators were also expected on Wednesday to begin downloading
data from the cockpit voice recorder, which retains the last two
hours of conversations on the flight deck and between the pilots and
air traffic controllers.
As is standard procedure, the NTSC will file a preliminary report,
which will be made public, to the International Civil Aviation
Organization within 30 days. A final report on the crash is not
expected to be published for at least a year, Siswosuwarno said.
After the recovery of the two black boxes, Indonesia is expected to
scale back search and rescue operations in the Java Sea.
But government officials sought to reassure victims' families that
efforts to retrieve the remains of their loved ones would continue.
"We understand if the search becomes smaller ... but the bodies have
to be found," said Frangky Chandry, whose younger brother was on the
plane.
"We want to bury our family. That's what we want."
(Additional reporting by Eveline Danubrata and Charlotte Greenfield
in JAKARTA and Fransiska Nangoy in SURABAYA; Writing by Randy Fabi;
Editing by Alex Richardson and Rachel Armstrong)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
