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AirAsia Plane Debris and Bodies Are Found in Search AirAsia Plane Debris and Bodies Are Found in Search
(about 1 hour later)
SURABAYA, Indonesia — Indonesian rescue teams said Tuesday that they had found bodies and what appeared to be debris from the AirAsia plane that vanished less than an hour after taking off from the airport here on Sunday. SURABAYA, Indonesia — The mystery of Indonesia’s missing airliner was partly solved on Tuesday as rescue teams retrieved and tallied a grim inventory of bodies and debris off the coast of Borneo. But it remained unknown what caused AirAsia Flight 8501 to plunge into the sea on Sunday less than an hour after taking off from the Surabaya airport.
Djoko Murjatmodjo, a senior official with Indonesia’s Transportation Ministry, confirmed that the debris was from Flight 8501, which was carrying 162 people when it disappeared. “We’ve confirmed the wreckage was from the body of the plane,” he said Tuesday in Jakarta, the capital. Although Indonesian officials did not explicitly say so, their comments suggested it was unlikely that survivors would be found.
Members of search teams told the Indonesian news media that they had spotted what appeared to be suitcases, life vests and aircraft debris. Indonesian television showed a rescuer descending from a helicopter toward a bloated corpse floating in the sea. The bodies shown on television were not wearing life jackets. “I am so very sorry for this accident,” Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, said before meeting with families of passengers here. “I hope families can stay strong while facing tragedy.”
The bodies and debris were found in the Karimata Strait off the coast of Borneo. The first sightings were about 66 miles southeast of the last detected position of the plane, whose destination was in the opposite direction, toward the northwest. It was not immediately clear whether the jet had changed course in its final moments in the air. Throughout the afternoon, the Indonesian authorities built up an inventory of debris collected by ships and helicopters from the sea surface: life vests, aircraft parts and what appeared to be a small blue suitcase. Indonesian television showed a rescuer descending from a helicopter toward a corpse, which like other bodies found was not wearing a life jacket.
Search teams also spotted what appeared to be a larger piece of the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which was operated by the Indonesian affiliate of AirAsia. The Indonesian authorities said the pieces of wreckage were found about 60 miles southeast of the last known position of the plane — the opposite direction from the plane’s path, a fact that was not explained.
“My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ 8501,” Tony Fernandes, the founder of AirAsia, wrote in a Twitter message soon after the debris was discovered. “On behalf of AirAsia my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am.” Search teams also spotted what they said might be a larger submerged piece of the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which was operated by the Indonesian affiliate of AirAsia.
Earlier Tuesday, the Indonesian authorities had expanded the search area, suggesting that they had few leads as to the whereabouts of the plane, which vanished on Sunday morning, about 40 minutes after leaving Surabaya bound for Singapore. “My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ 8501,” Tony Fernandes, the head of AirAsia, wrote in a Twitter message soon after the debris was discovered. “On behalf of AirAsia my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am.”
“The area we are searching is huge,” Bambang Soelistyo, the head of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, said in a briefing. The total search area, including parts of Borneo and smaller islands in the Java Sea, was around 60,000 square miles, the authorities said. As news spread of the grim discoveries in the sea, some relatives of passengers stood despondently outside the Surabaya airport.
A United States warship had been dispatched to join the search for the missing jet, and Mr. Soelistyo said the Indonesian government had also accepted offers from South Korea and China to help in the search. “I’m still hoping my brother is safe,” said Ifan Joko, standing in a light drizzle outside the terminal where relatives and friends had gathered since Sunday.
The Java Sea, which separates the islands of Borneo and Java, is relatively shallow — around 160 feet at its deepest point — but monsoon conditions were clouding the waters, rescuers said. His brother, Charly Gunawan, who was traveling to Singapore to spend the New Year’s holiday, was among the 162 people onboard.
Indonesian meteorologists described recovery efforts as a race against time because foul weather — heavy rains, choppy seas and higher winds — was predicted from Friday onward in the search area.
The recovery process was likely to shed light on the cause of the disaster, which has been unknown since the plane disappeared on Sunday. Speculation has ranged from bad weather to fears that the aircraft was traveling too slowly to stay airborne.
Shortly before contact with the plane was lost, its cockpit crew told air traffic controllers that they planned to raise the plane to 38,000 feet from 32,000 feet to avoid a cloud, officials said Monday.
As news spread of the grim discoveries in the sea, relatives of passengers stood despondently outside the Surabaya airport.
“I’m still hoping my brother is safe,” said Ifan Joko, who stood in a light drizzle beside the terminal where relatives and friends had gathered since Sunday.
His brother, Charly Gunawan, who was traveling to Singapore to spend the New Year holiday, was among the 162 people onboard.
“If the passengers are dead, I want the bodies brought back to Surabaya,” Mr. Ifan said. “I will pay the bill myself if I have to.”“If the passengers are dead, I want the bodies brought back to Surabaya,” Mr. Ifan said. “I will pay the bill myself if I have to.”
The crash was a particular loss to Surabaya’s ethnic Chinese community. Flights from Surabaya to Singapore serve as shuttles for residents here who do business in Singapore or have family members there. The air disaster seems to have also disproportionately affected Surabaya’s Christian community.
Leaders of Bethany, a massive, three-story megachurch in a wealthy neighborhood on the outskirts of Surabaya, pored over the plane’s manifest when it became available on Sunday and determined that at least five passengers were members of families who attend the church.
Deddy, one of the church pastors, said the crash was a tragedy for all of Indonesia. But, he said, “We can guess from the names that many are Christian and Chinese.”
If passengers from both the AirAsia plane and the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in March are included in the calculations, 1,320 people died in air accidents in 2014, the deadliest year since 2005, according to the Bureau of Aircraft Incidents Archives, an organization that tracks aviation accidents.
But the number of fatalities this year has been heavily skewed by the AirAsia crash and two Malaysia Airlines disasters — another of the airline’s jets was shot down over Ukraine in July with 298 people aboard — which taken together made up 60 percent of all aviation deaths in 2014.
Over all, advances in aviation safety remain encouraging — the number of airline crashes has been on a downward trend for several decades. There were 111 crashes in 2014, and by this measure it was the safest year since 1927 — a remarkable decline given the exponential growth in air traffic.
The two-day delay in locating the AirAsia wreckage, however, seems likely to add to pressure on airlines to equip their aircraft with devices that send out location coordinates and other diagnostic information.
Miles Gerety, an attorney in Connecticut, said calls for more data streaming from aircraft have been around since at least 1998, when a Swissair flight crashed on its way to Geneva from New York and some data was lost from the black box onboard.
Mr. Gerety, whose brother died on the Swissair flight, recently sailed across the Atlantic on a 35-foot boat and used a device that regularly transmitted his position.
“The technology to update a vessel’s position every minute, 30 seconds or even one second is readily available and cheap,” he said by email.