Indonesia focuses on recovering tail of AirAsia plane

Bangkok, Jan 8 (IANS/EFE) Rescue teams Thursday were focusing their efforts on recovering the tail of the AirAsia plane that crashed into the Java Sea late last month with 162 people on board and extracting the black box flight recorders located in the tail section.

"We enter Day 12 of this AirAsia rescue operation. We hope to recover the plane's tail section," wrote Indonesia's chief of armed forces, Gen. Moeldoko, on his Twitter account before leaving to oversee the work.

On Wednesday, Indonesian authorities confirmed that the airplane's tail had been spotted, lying upside down and partially buried in the seabed, at a depth of some 28 metres in the Java Sea.

Meanwhile, Suryadi Supriyadi, Indonesia's director of national search and rescue operations, said that experts from Indonesia and France were trying to find a way to extract the black boxes from the buried tail section.

In the photos of the remains that have been published, the registration number "PK-AXC" of the AirAsia plane can be seen, as well as the company logo in the few pieces that have been found some nine km from the point where contact was lost with the aircraft.

Six ships equipped with devices to detect objects underwater and nine navy frigates are working in the area where the wreckage was found, according to the Indonesian agency.

The black boxes, two orange-coloured devices that record cockpit conversations and flight data, are located in the tail section of the Airbus 320-200, the model of the crashed plane.

Experts believe that analysis of the data from those devices could reveal what happened to the airplane before it crashed into the sea.

AirAsia flight QZ8501 took off from Surabaya on Java Island Dec 28 and was scheduled to reach Singapore some two hours later, but crashed into the sea about 40 minutes after take off.

The plane's passengers included 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, a Briton, a Frenchman, a Malaysian and a Singaporean, along with a crew of seven.

The pilot called Indonesian air traffic control and sought permission to swerve left and make a climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet to avoid a storm.

Air traffic controllers gave permission to turn left but were unable to establish contact with the plane when they called a few minutes later to approve a climb to 34,000 feet.

Rescue teams have so far recovered 40 bodies out of the 162 people who were aboard the aircraft.