Pings detected from black box of AirAsia Flight 8501
An Indonesian investigator confirms pings have been detected in the Java Sea as search and rescue teams hunt for victims and wreckage from AirAsia Flight 8501
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Twelve days after AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed with 162 people on board, Indonesian officials announced they had detected pings from the missing plane’s black box.
"Yes we have detected pings,” Suryanto, an investigator from Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee, told The Telegraph on Thursday.
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Santoso Sayogo, another investigator, told reporters: “We received an update from the field that the pinger locator already detected pings.”
“We have our fingers crossed it is the black box. Divers need to confirm,” he added.
However, Suryanto said divers had already been able to confirm that the black box was no longer inside the plane’s tail section, where it is stored, suggesting its recovery may be more complicated that previously anticipated.
The batteries inside the black box generally last for 30 days.
The tail was spotted on the seabed on Wednesday, around 18 miles from the presumed crash site. “If right part of tail section then the black box should be there,” Tony Fernandes, AirAsia’s chief executive, wrote at the time.
Flight QZ8501 from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore lost contact with air traffic controllers around 40 minutes after it took off on the morning of December 28.
Since then a multinational search effort has been underway in the Java Sea, off the south-western tip of Borneo, to find the bodies of victims as well as the plane’s wreckage and the flight recorders that could help explain the disaster.
By Friday morning, when five more bodies were reportedly brought to shore, a total of 46 victims had been recovered.
However, poor weather and 10ft waves have made search and rescue operations difficult.
Speculation over what caused South East Asia’s third major aviation disaster of 2014 has so far focused on severe storm weather conditions in the region.
One Indonesian expert with access to initial investigations last week claimed that having climbed steeply to avoid bad weather, the AirAsia Airbus 320 then plunged towards the sea “like a piece of metal”.
However, Jean-Paul Troadec, who led investigations into the 2009 crash of an Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, appeared to contradict those claims this week.
“The pieces of the aircraft are not so fragmented, it’s quite large pieces,” he was quoted as saying by NBC. “The fact that the bodies seem intact means most probably that the impact was not very violent and that the airplane was probably horizontal when it crashed into the sea.”
It was too early to say weather had been “the cause” of the accident, the expert added.
