AirAsia victim with life jacket raises new questions about plane’s last moments

A body recovered on Wednesday from the crashed AirAsia plane was wearing a life jacket, an Indonesian search and rescue official said, raising new questions about how the disaster unfolded. Rescuers believe they have found the plane on the ocean floor off Borneo, after sonar detected a large, dark object beneath waters near where debris and bodies were found on the surface. Ships and planes had been scouring the Java Sea for Flight QZ8501 since Sunday, when it lost contact during bad weather about 40 minutes into its flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore. The fact that one person put on a life jacket suggests those on board had time before the aircraft hit the water, or before it sank.

We are praying it is the plane so the evacuation can be done quickly.

President Joko Widodo

Radar data being examined by investigators appeared to show that AirAsia Flight QZ8501 made an “unbelievably” steep climb before it crashed, possibly pushing it beyond the Airbus A320’s limits, said a source familiar with the probe’s initial findings. The data was transmitted before the aircraft disappeared from the screens of air traffic controllers in Jakarta on Sunday, added the source, who declined to be identified. Finding the six-year-old plane’s cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR), more commonly known as black boxes, will be vital to complement the radar data already available.

So far, the numbers taken by the radar are unbelievably high. This rate of climb is very high, too high. It appears to be beyond the performance envelope of the aircraft.

Source speaking anonymously to Reuters

World AirAsia