AirAsia crash: Pinger locator deployed

A pinger locator to find the black box of the missing AirAsia plane was deployed Sunday.

The ill-fated Airbus A320-200 aircraft with 155 passengers and seven crew members on board went missing soon after taking off from Surabaya Dec 28 en route to Singapore's Changi airport. The debris were spotted last Tuesday.

The jetliner is believed to have crashed in the Java Sea, near Karimata Strait, some 153 km from Pangkalan Bun in Central Kalimantan province in Borneo island.

The pinger locator was transported from Central Kalimantan province's Pangima Utar seaport by the National Search and Rescue Agency and was later transferred to Baruna Jaya I research ship owned by the Research and Application of Technology Agency (BPPT), an official said.

The pinger locator would be deployed into the sea to send a signal to the missing AirAsia plane's black box, Indonesia's Antara News Agency quoted him as saying.

"The black box instrument is expected to respond to the call signal, so its location could be identified," he added.

On Saturday, the BPPT detected a metal object, but it turned out that it was not the AirAsia plane's fuselage.

The research ship is expected to search for the fuselage in different locations later in the day.

The countries helping in the search efforts, besides Indonesia and Singapore, are the US, Japan, China, South Korea, India, and Russia.

So far, 30 bodies have been fished out from the Java Sea waters. The first victim of the ill-fated plane was identified Thursday.