Strong winds thwart bids to locate jet’s black boxes

Strong currents and blinding silt thwarted an attempt by divers to find AirAsia Flight 8501’s black boxes, which they hope are still located in the recently discovered tail of the plane.

The flight data and cockpit voice recorders, which are crucial to helping determine what caused the jet to go down with 162 people aboard on December 28, are located in the rear of the aircraft.

A day after an unmanned underwater vehicle spotted the plane’s tail, partially buried in the sea floor, divers were unable to make it past choppy waters and 1m visibility, said National Search and Rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo.

Ping-emitting beacons in the black boxes still have about 20 days before their batteries go dead.

A total of six ships with ping locators were in the search area in the Java Sea, said Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator from the National Commission for Transportation Safety. He said he believed that the black boxes were still attached to their original location.

The tail wreckagewas located about 9km from where the Airbus A320 carrying 162 passengers and crew lost contact with the control tower on December 28. The plane was nearly halfway between the Indonesian city of Surabaya and Singapore.

Tony Fernandes, Air-Asia’s CEO, said the airline’s priority was still to recover all the bodies “to ease the pain of our families”. Four more bodies were retrieved from the sea yesterday, bringing to 44 the number of victims recovered so far.

Officials are hopeful many of the 121 bodies still unaccounted for will be found inside the fuselage, which is thought to be lying near the tail.

The carrier, meanwhile, said families of those killed would be compensated in accordance with Indonesian laws. Each will receive 1.25bn rupiah (€83,000), Sunu Widyatmoko, president of AirAsia Indonesia, said.