Indonesian rescuers managed to lift the fuselage of the crashed Indonesia AirAsia flight QZ8501 jet near the surface, only for it to sink to the ocean floor again when the lifting balloons deflated.
Operations chief at the National Search and Rescue Agency, Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi, said four more bodies were discovered Saturday around the area as navy divers were struggling with strong current and poor visibility to prepare the lifting operation.
A total of 69 bodies have been recovered from AirAsia Flight 8501, which crashed on Dec 28 with 162 people on board.
Authorities believe many victims are still inside the fuselage.
Bad weather is a suspected factor in the crash. The pilots asked to climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet to avoid threatening clouds, but were denied because of heavy air traffic. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
Rescuers workers managed to lift the fuselage of the jet nearly to the water’s surface before it sank to the ocean floor again when the lifting balloons deflated, in a setback in the effort to recover more of the victims’ remains.
Divers were struggling with strong current and poor visibility to prepare to retrieve the 30-metre-long wreckage, said Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi, the operations chief at the National Search and Rescue Agency.
“We now need additional balloons,” Supriyadi said after Saturday’s setback.
He added that the cockpit was reported to be about 500 metres from the fuselage at a depth of 30 metres and that the bodies of the pilot and co-pilot might be inside. “Divers would evacuate [them] if they are there,” he said.
Divers were able to enter the main section of the plane, which crashed in the Java Sea last month, for the first time on Friday and retrieved six bodies.
A total of 69 bodies have now been recovered from Flight 8501, which crashed on 28 December with 162 people on board while flying from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, to Singapore.
Poor weather for the past week had prevented salvage workers from reaching the main part of the Airbus A320-200 since its location was determined earlier this month.
Passengers’ belongings including milk cartons, hair rollers and an iPhone with headphones still attached, as well as aircraft parts such as seat cushions and tables, floated out as the fuselage was being lifted, according to one report.
Detritus including wires and seats floating inside the fuselage stopped divers from entering the main section to find more bodies on Friday.
“The divers said it was dark inside, the seats were floating about and the wires were like a tangled yarn,” Supriyadi said.
Rescue officials hoped that more bodies could be retrieved when the fuselage had been raised.
The plane’s black boxes – the cockpit voice and flight data recorders – were recovered last week, and were being analysed by investigators and Airbus advisers.
Indonesian transport minister Ignasius Jonan said this week that the plane climbed unusually fast before stalling and plunging into the sea.
Moments before the plane disappeared from radar screens, the pilot had asked to climb to avoid a major storm but was not immediately granted permission due to heavy air traffic in the area.
Tatang Kurniadi, head of Indonesia’s national transportation safety committee, has ruled out sabotage and said a preliminary report was expected to be submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organisation next week.
A full analysis of what went wrong could take up to a year, he added.
