By Ainur Rohmah
JAKARTA
The Indonesian search team hunting for the remains of AirAsia Flight QZ8501 confirmed Wednesday that the airplane’s fuselage had been found in the Java Sea.
Tatang Zainuddin, deputy operations chief at the National Search and Rescue Agency, told The Anadolu Agency: "The Singapore ship has alerted us that they found the fuselage in the priority [search] area this afternoon."
The confirmation follows Singaporean Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen writing on Facebook that a Singaporean ship had located the fuselage.
Zainuddin said the search team had also recovered two bodies from close to the fuselage of the Airbus 320-200, taking the number of retrieved bodies to 50.
It has been presumed that the majority of the remains of the 162 passengers and crew will be found strapped to their seats in the fuselage but Zainuddin said the search team had been unable to verify this yet.
The discovery, at 3.05 p.m. Indonesian time (0805GMT), was made by MV Swift Rescue in the Karimata Strait off Borneo island, nearly two miles (three kilometers) from where the plane’s tail section was found last week.
Zainuddin said Indonesian ships were heading to the location and divers would be deployed to search the wreckage Thursday. The priority is to retrieve the remains of the victims before attempting to raise the fuselage, he added.
Referring to the search agency by its Indonesian acronym, President Joko Widodo told a press conference in Jakarta: "Basarnas along with other parties will concentrate to evacuate the bodies of those still missing."
Ng posted photographs taken by a Singaporean search robot on his Facebook page. The images showed the AirAsia slogan "Now everyone can fly" on the wreckage.
The plane lost contact with air traffic control during bad weather Dec. 28 while flying from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.
On Monday, families of the victims expressed fears that the search for remaining bodies of those on board may be called off following the retrieval of both of the plane’s black boxes.
"We hope [the search] will not be stopped. It's OK for them to reduce search and rescue team personnel, as long as it does not stop the search," Franky Chandra, a relative of one of the missing passengers, told Kompas.com.
Indonesia’s rescue agency confirmed Wednesday that it will not stop the search but replace basic operations with daily operations.
Agency chief Bambang Soelistyo said basic search operations typically end on the seventh day of an accident, but elaborated that "this operation has been extended many times."
He added, however, that assistance from countries such as Russia and South Korea had been reduced as the search area narrowed.
With investigators beginning to download data from the two boxes, search teams in the Java Sea had intensified efforts to discover the fuselage.
Meanwhile, the National Transportation Safety Committee tasked with analyzing the black box data has promised to open the investigation’s results to the public.
