More bodies found, search in full swing

[Lite Beer]

FLIGHT QZ8501
More bodies found, search in full swing
Jakarta January 3, 2015 1:00 am

Divers still seeking main fuselage of AirAsia jet; tail of plane detected

MORE BODIES were found yesterday as the search was in full swing for the flight recorders and fuselage of the AirAsia plane that crashed off Indonesia with 162 people on board.

Twenty bodies were recovered from the sea off Borneo island, bringing the confirmed death toll to 30, search chief Bambang Sulistyo told reporters.

A US navy Seahawk helicopter unloaded eight of the bodies in Pangkalan Bun, a town in Central Kalimantan province, after they were retrived from the sea by a US navy ship, officials said.

The captain of an Indonesian navy ship said it had detected what appeared to be the tail of the plane at the bottom of the ocean. "We managed to detect the tail of the aircraft using the side-scan sonar," the captain of the KRI Bung Tomo, Colonel Yayan Sofyan, said on Metro TV. He said the object was on the sea bed at a depth of 29 metres.

Search chief Bambang said the hunt for the aircraft's fuselage and the flight recorder was focused on an area of 1,575 square nautical miles (about 5,400 sq km), involving ships equipped with sonar technology and signal detectors.

The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, also known as black boxes, are key to shedding light on what went wrong with the flight, which was AirAsia's first fatal crash.

At least three Indonesian ships were in the area, as well as one from Singapore, and one from the US. Divers from the Indonesian Navy were also involved in the search. Seventeen aircraft and 29 ships were taking part in the wider search, he said.

Indonesia’s National Transport Safety Committee chief, Tatang Kurniadi, said five hydrophones were ready to be deployed to detect acoustic signals underwater. Two were from Singapore and one from Britain, he said.

"We are racing against time," Tatang said. "The signal lasts only 30days and if the signal is dead, we will have to use remotely operated vehicles to locate them, which will be more difficult."

Hydrophones will not work effectively during high seas because of the extra noise, he said, as weather conditions improved around the search area.

"This morning weather is quite good but there's still light rain," Bambang said early in the day. Remains of the victims will be sent to Surabaya, where the AirAsia flight departed, for identification.

The first victim officially identified was passenger Hayati Lutfiah Hamid, who was buried by her family on Thursday.

Three more victims were identified yesterday, including flight attendant Khairunnisa Haidar Fauzi, 22, and Kevin Alexander, an Indonesian student at Monash University in Australia.

Their remains were handed over to their families in a solemn ceremony in Surabaya.

AirAsia chief Tony Fernandes said in a message on Twitter that he would accompany the remains of Khairunnisa to her home in Palembang in Sumatra province.

Flight QZ8501 crashed on Sunday halfway through a two-hour flight between Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, and Singapore.

The Airbus A320-200 last made contact with air traffic control in Jakarta to request permission to ascend to avoid bad weather.

When air traffic control contacted the plane a few minutes later to tell the pilots that they could make a limited ascent, there was no response.

AirAsia said 155 of the people on board were Indonesians. The others included three from South Korea, and one each from Singapore, Malaysia, France and Britain.

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/More-bodies-found-search-in-full-swing-30251127.html

-- The Nation 2015-01-02

[Nemesis7]

RIP

[thailand49]

I'm Chinese! But like always where are the Chinese when it comes to helping? No where, they seem to only help their own people and to spend money on being the aggressor in SEA. And I wonder when they actually do become official the number #1 economy and dream of their currency being number #1, how much will take help then?

[alex8912]

Agreed. It's always the USA who comes along and helps. It's always the USA who gets bashed on here as well.

[poweratradio]

I'm Chinese! But like always where are the Chinese when it comes to helping? No where, they seem to only help their own people and to spend money on being the aggressor in SEA. And I wonder when they actually do become official the number #1 economy and dream of their currency being number #1, how much will take help then?

Dream dream dream....

[Robby nz]

Agreed. It's always the USA who comes along and helps. It's always the USA who gets bashed on here as well.

Russia is there helping as well and they seem to be coming in for more than their share of bashing lately.