AirAsia jet tail found; search teams ‘desperately’ seek black boxes

Recovery teams have found the tail of the crashed AirAsia Flight 8501 in the Java Sea, the Indonesian search chief said Wednesday, nearly two weeks after the plane vanished from radar screens. The discovery on the seabed marks a breakthrough in the search because the tail of a plane usually houses the “black box” flight data recorders, which are crucial to determining the cause of a crash. The plane crashed during a storm on December 28 when it was flying from the city of Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board, most of them Indonesian.

[The search team] now is still desperately trying to locate the black box.

Search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo

Despite a huge recovery operation assisted by various countries, progress has been patchy with poor weather conditions hampering the search. Forty bodies and debris from the plane have been plucked from the surface of the waters off Borneo, but strong winds and high waves have been hampering divers’ efforts to reach larger pieces of suspected wreckage detected by sonar on the sea floor.

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