Weather worries remain in hunt for AirAsia plane

Associated Press

SURABAYA, Indonesia

More ships arrived today with sensitive equipment to search for the fuselage of AirAsia Flight 8501 and the more than 150 people still missing since it crashed five days ago.

Rear Marshal Henry Bambang Soelistyo, head of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, said the search would be stepped up as long as the weather allowed.

“We will focus on underwater detection,” said Soelistyo, adding ships from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the U.S. had been on the scene from before dawn Friday to try to pinpoint the wreckage and the all-important black boxes— the flight data and cockpit voice recorders.

The Airbus A320 crashed into the Java Sea on Sunday with 162 people on board. Ten bodies have been recovered so far, with the latest, a female victim, announced today.

Nine planes, many with metal detectors, were also scouring an 8,380-square-mile area off Pangkalan Bun, the closest town on Borneo island to the search area. Two Japanese ships with three helicopters are on their way to the area, Soelistyo said.

He said bad weather, which has hindered the search for several days, was a worry, with forecasts of rain, strong winds and high waves up to 13 feet until Sunday. Strong sea currents have kept debris moving.

He estimated that the fuselage was at a depth of 80 to 100 feet, and vowed to recover the bodies of “our brothers and sisters ... whatever the conditions we face.”

So far, one victim of the crash has been identified and was returned to her family Thursday.

Hayati Lutfiah Hamid’s identity was confirmed by fingerprints and other means, said Col. Budiyono of East Java’s Disaster Victim Identification Unit.

Her body, in a dark coffin topped with flowers, was handed over to family members during a brief ceremony at a police hospital in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city where the plane took off. The coffin was then taken to a village and lowered into a muddy grave, following Muslim obligations requiring bodies to be buried quickly.

It is unclear what brought the plane down about halfway into its two-hour flight to Singapore. The jet’s last communication indicated the pilots were worried about bad weather. They sought permission to climb above threatening clouds but were denied because of heavy air traffic. Four minutes later, the airliner disappeared from the radar without issuing a distress signal.