Indonesian divers recover 6 more bodies from AirAsia crash

By: 10 years ago

Members of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and Indonesian Search and Rescue Agency unload the body of a victim aboard AirAsia Flight 8501 from a helicopter upon arrival at the airport in Pangkalan Bun, Indonesia, on Jan. 9. AP

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia—Indonesian divers retrieved on Thursday six more bodies from waters around the sunken fuselage of the AirAsia jetliner that crashed last month.

Divers were struggling against strong current and poor visibility to lift the fuselage and what appeared to be the plane’s cockpit from the seabed at a depth of 100 feet.

So far, 59 bodies have been recovered from AirAsia Flight 8501, which plunged into the Java Sea with 162 people while en route from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, to Singapore. Officials believed the rest were still inside the main fuselage.

National Transportation Safety Committee head Tatang Kurniadi on Wednesday ruled out sabotage, as investigators downloaded and began analyzing data from the aircraft’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders with advisers from Airbus, the plane’s manufacturer.

Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan told Parliament earlier this week that radar data showed that the plane was climbing at an abnormally high rate—about 6,000 feet a minute—then dropped rapidly and disappeared. He did not say what caused the plane to climb so rapidly, but the pilots asked to climb from 32,000 feet to 38,000 feet to avoid threatening clouds and were denied permission because of heavy air traffic. No distress signal was received.