Divers searching AirAsia QZ8501 fuselage in Java Sea

By Ainur Rohmah

JAKARTA

Divers began searching Thursday the area of the Java Sea where the fuselage of AirAsia flight QZ8501 was discovered, in hopes of recovering the bodies that search teams believe may be strapped to their seats.

The plane lost contact with air traffic control during bad weather Dec. 28 while flying from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore. Since then, the bodies of just 50 of the 162 people on board have been found, with the last two recovered from near the fuselage.

Bambang Soelistyo, head of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, said Thursday that teams of divers were deployed to the Karimata Strait off Borneo island to examine the part’s condition and to recover the dead.

"The main focus is searching for victims who are still around the fuselage or who are trapped in it," Kompas.com quoted him as saying.

The divers are also tasked with assessing how the plane’s parts can be retrieved from the ocean floor.

"The size of fuselage is 30x10x3 meters. It was largest finding so far, " Soelistyo said. He explained that they could not provide an estimate of the number of bodies in the main part as a remote operated vehicle had not detected any.

"However, because the object found is quite large, it is suspected most of the bodies are still in the fuselage," he added.

The fuselage was discovery Wednesday afternoon by a Singapore ship nearly two miles (three kilometers) from where the plane’s tail section was found last week, Tatang Zainuddin, the agency’s deputy operations chief, told The Anadolu Agency.

The confirmation followed Singaporean Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen posting on Facebook photographs taken by a Singaporean search robot that showed the AirAsia slogan "Now everyone can fly" on the wreckage, which appears to have the wing section attached.

SB Supriyadi, the Indonesian agency’s director of operations, explained that divers would first calculate the size of the part stuck in the sea floor so it could be lifted using floatation bags and a crane.

"However, before raising the fuselage, divers will evacuate bodies one-by-one from inside the fuselage," he said.

Lukman Soleh, head of the Meteorological Station at Iskandar Airfield, predicted the search area would experience rainfall, though it might not disturb operations.

"It is raining at the location where the fuselage was found, and will continue until the afternoon," he said in a release.

Meanwhile, the National Transportation Safety Committee tasked with analyzing data from the two black boxes retrieved earlier this week has promised to open the investigation’s results to the public. Investigators are hoping that the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder will reveal clues as to the final minutes of Flight QZ8501. 

Following their recovery, families of the victims have expressed fears that the search for remaining bodies might be called off.

On Wednesday, Soelistyo assured that the agency would not stop the search but replace basic operations with daily operations, alongside the reduction of assistance from countries such as Russia and South Korea as the search area narrows.

The next day, he again stressed, "A search operation is still continuing until there is an announcement of termination of operations formally."