One week after AirAsia Flight QZ8501 disappeared from air traffic control radar, the search for victims and more of its wreckage was underway Sunday, officials said.
Waves are expected to be 1.5 to 2 meters high, said Bambang Sulistyo, head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, at a press conference in Jakarta.
Sulistyo said that if the weather is relatively good, divers will be sent to the location where four objects were detected on sonar.
There are 89 divers on standby and divers from Russia will join the effort, he said.
Search teams have found four large pieces of debris believed to be parts of the aircraft. Sulistyo said the latest objects — including one that is 18 meters (59 feet) long — were located by sonar in the priority search area.
Searchers came upon the metal parts after spotting an oil slick late Friday.
Bad weather conditions — including 15-foot waves and strong underwater currents — prevented divers from conducting searches Saturday, meaning no additional bodies were recovered. Sunday’s forecast called for more favorable conditions, he said.
Sinking bodies
Anton Castilani is eager to get the rest of the victims out of the waters before they sink to the bottom of the sea. He is in charge of identifying them and said that gases in the bodies that keep them afloat disperse after a few days in the water.
It’s been nearly a week already. The plane went missing on Sunday.
He urged families to be patient with his team as they identify loved ones. He wants to do his work right. “We have to make sure that we have to return that right body to the right family,” he said.
Decomposition also slows his work down. “The later the dead bodies come to you, the harder you work,” he said. His team uses fingerprints and dental records as well as DNA to find out who they have recovered.
Recoveries, identifications
On Friday, the USS Sampson, which the U.S. Navy has deployed to help, recovered some bodies. Altogether, the number retrieved rose to 30.
A limited number of them will be autopsied to determine the cause of death to aid the investigation, an Indonesian official said Saturday. But many families don’t want autopsies done.
“For the sake of the investigation, we agree, and it is accepted by Interpol, to perform autopsies on the pilot, co-pilot and some randomly selected passengers,” said East Java Police Chief Anas Yusuf.
Six of the plane’s victims have been identified. The first, Hayati Lutfiah Hamid, was laid to rest Thursday.
AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes said he was traveling to Surabaya, Indonesia, to bring home the body of flight attendant Khairunisa Haidar Fauzi.
“I cannot describe how I feel. There are no words,” he said on Twitter.
Search priorities
Finding the fuselage and black box of the Airbus A320-200 has priority for the 59 diving teams searching underneath the waves. Russia has joined the effort with 22 underwater teams along with a search plane and a cargo jet.
The searchers are concentrating on a 1,575-square-nautical-mile zone that officials believe is the “most probable area” to find the remains of the aircraft.
Here’s where things stand on Flight QZ8501:
The flight
What we know: QZ8501 took off early December 28 from Surabaya, bound for Singapore. Roughly 35 minutes into the flight, the pilot asked air traffic control for permission to turn left and climb to avoid bad weather. Minutes later, the plane disappeared from air traffic control’s radar.
What we don’t know: What happened on board after contact with the plane was lost. No distress call was received.
Some experts speculate that the aircraft experienced an aerodynamic stall because of a lack of speed or from flying at too sharp an angle to get enough lift. Other theories include a lack of information about the plane’s position or storm damage to the engines.
The investigation
What we know: The “black boxes” are key. Actually, they’re orange and should be in the plane’s tail. A lab in Jakarta will analyze them, if they are recovered. The batteries powering the “pingers” that send acoustic signals have only about 24 days of power left.
What we don’t know: What destroyed the plane. Investigators will need to use information gleaned from the flight recorders and clues from the wreckage to try to find out.
“The more bits I can put into my mosaic, the better my picture will be,” aviation safety expert Michael Barr said.
The plane and the pilots
What we know: The Airbus, operated by AirAsia’s Indonesian affiliate, had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours in about 13,600 flights in six years. The plane’s last scheduled maintenance was November 16.
Flight 8501’s veteran captain, Iriyanto, 53, had 20,537 flying hours, 6,100 of them with AirAsia on the Airbus A320, the airline said. The first officer, Remi Emmanuel Plesel, 46, had 2,275 flying hours, a reasonable amount for his position.
Indonesian authorities are looking in to why AirAsia was flying that particular route on that particular day; the country’s transport ministry claims that AirAsia was permitted to fly it only on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. AirAsia said it will cooperate with the inquiry and suspended all service from Surabaya to Singapore in the meantime.
What we don’t know: Did technical problems or human error have anything to do with the crash? A major aviation database registers 54 incidents involving the A320.
Some A320 accidents and incidents involve fan-cowl detachments, landing gear collapse, bird strikes and pilot error, an expert said. These cause disasters only in very rare cases.
Security threat?
Meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta issued a security alert Saturday after being “made aware of a potential threat against U.S.-associated hotels and banks in Surabaya.” A State Department official, however, told CNN that there was “no knowledge of any connection between this threat and the Air Asia flight.”
No additional information was given regarding the nature of the threat, but the Embassy recommended “heightened vigilance and awareness of one’s surroundings when visiting such facilities.”