Indonesia searches for AirAsia black box amid bad weather

The search for the crashed AirAsia Bhd jetliner's black box yielded no results as inclement weather and three-meter high waves in the Java Sea hampered recovery crews' ability to find more bodies and the plane's fuselage.

Bad weather is expected to persist through Jan. 4, F.H. Bambang Sulistyo, head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency Basarnas, said at a press briefing in Jakarta as operations ended for the night. Indonesia is in need of a device to detect metal underwater, which it will receive from Singapore, he said.

Divers, helicopters, planes and ships scoured the Java Sea for the remains of Flight 8501 in a search that has so far yielded nine bodies. The cockpit-voice recorder and the flight- data recorder of the Airbus Group NV jet have eluded the 17 helicopters and 67 divers Indonesia used in the hunt near Pangkalan Bun, about 600 miles southeast of Singapore. Parts of the aircraft were identified after sonar contact at 24 meters (79 feet) under water, Hadi Tjahjanto, a spokesman for the country's Air Force said by phone.

Steep Climb

Recovering the fuselage and black box of the A320 plane that went down with 162 people on board could help answer why the six-year-old aircraft on a routine commercial flight to Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia, went down Dec. 28. Flying at 32,000 feet, the pilot had asked for a higher altitude, citing clouds, officials have said.

An "abnormal situation occurred" at that height, said AirNav Indonesia, the nation's air-navigation operator.

"For sure, the aircraft was experiencing an abnormal situation," Wisnu Darjono, a director at AirNav said in a phone interview. "Abnormal situations can be up, down, turbulence, helter-skelter. But we can't say how. Abnormality in an aeroplane can be due to the weather, human error or something else."

Preliminary data appeared to show that the AirAsia plane made an "unbelievably" steep climb before it crashed, possibly pushing it beyond the plane's limits, Reuters reported earlier, citing an unidentified person familiar with the probe's initial findings.

Darjono declined to comment on the report.

Emergency Door

Search crews found objects including what appears to be an emergency door as well as submerged items resembling plane parts, Sulistyo has said. Searchers recovered an evacuation slide yesterday. No bodies were found wearing a life jacket, Air Force spokesman Hadi Tjahjanto said in an interview yesterday.

"I am hoping that the latest information is correct and aircraft has been found," AirAsia Group Chief Executive Officer Tony Fernandes said in a Twitter post. "Please all hope together. This is so important."

The recovery effort will involve salvaging large pieces of the plane, engines, landing gear and other wreckage requiring heavy-duty lifting capability. The parts are then pieced together for the investigation. Indonesia has sent a tanker to help with recovery, Sulistyo said today.

Black Box

Flight 8501 was the third high-profile incident involving a carrier in Asia last year, raising safety concerns in one of the fastest-growing aviation markets in the world. AirAsia is the biggest customer by units of the A320, a workhorse airliner that's used by hundreds of carriers around the world.

The black boxes, which are encased in bright orange to facilitate their retrieval, are waterproof, fortified and designed to emit an electronic signal underwater for 30 days to help searchers find them.

Safety advocates have been pushing for years to improve black boxes, by enabling them to float and to stream data to ground stations in real time.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board held a forum in October on the subject and "is currently exploring what the next steps might be," including possible safety recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration, Peter Knudson, an NTSB spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement.

The black boxes could answer questions for families who wonder what happened, provide insight to the industry about what causes accidents and prompt changes to practices or new technologies.

A spate of crashes in the past decade had prompted Indonesia in 2008 to amend laws and boost plane-safety checks after the European Union imposed a ban on its carriers from flying to Europe. The ban was partially lifted later.

Indonesia had 3.77 fatal accidents for every 1 million takeoffs in the three years ended March 31, London-based aviation adviser Ascend said in 2007. The global rate was 0.25 then.