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SEARCHERS PULL AIRASIA PLANE DEBRIS AND BODIES FROM JAVA SEA

Thomas Fuller

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Dec. 30,2014

SURABAYA, Indonesia — The mystery of Indonesia’s missing airliner was partly solved on Tuesday, when rescue teams retrieved and tallied a grim inventory of bodies and debris from the plane off the coast of southwestern Borneo.

But it remained unknown what caused the plane, AirAsia Flight 8501, to plunge into the sea on Sunday, less than an hour after leaving Surabaya for Singapore.

Although Indonesian officials did not say so explicitly, their comments on Tuesday suggested that it was unlikely that survivors would be found.

“I am so very sorry for this accident,” Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, said before meeting with families of passengers here. “I hope families can stay strong while facing tragedy.”

Throughout the afternoon, the Indonesian authorities built up an inventory of debris collected by ships and helicopters from the sea surface, including life vests, aircraft parts and what appeared to be a small blue suitcase. Indonesian television showed a rescuer descending from a helicopter toward a corpse, which, like other bodies found, was not wearing a life jacket.

 

 

 

Where AirAsia Flight 8501 Was Lost and Debris Found

Maps of the flight path, air traffic near the plane when it disappeared and where debris was found.

 

 

And Bambang Soelistyo, the head of Indonesia’s National Search and Rescue Agency, said more bodies had been retrieved from the Java Sea early Wednesday, including one of a woman in a flight attendent’s uniform. Further search efforts were hampered by foul weather, he added.

Search and rescue officials said that three items in particular — the suitcase and parts they identified as an aspirator assembly and a reservoir slide craft — helped them determine that the debris came from Flight 8501. An Indonesian Navy spokesman told The Associated Press that a plane door and oxygen tanks also were recovered.

The Indonesian authorities said the pieces of wreckage were found about 60 miles southeast of the last known position of the plane — the opposite direction from the plane’s path.

How the debris came to be there was not immediately explained. But according to Sailing Directions, a reference published by the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, currents in that part of the Java Sea run generally to the southeast from November to March.

Luca Centurioni, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego who measures currents around the world, said it would not be surprising for the floating debris to have drifted 60 miles since Sunday morning, especially in unsettled weather. “The currents are not terribly strong,” he said in a telephone interview, “but the waves can be big, and the wind can push objects quite a bit.”

Search teams also spotted what they said might be a larger submerged piece of the fuselage of the aircraft, an Airbus A320-200 that was operated by an Indonesian affiliate of AirAsia.

 

 

Continue reading the main story Video
Play Video|0:47

Families of AirAsia Flight 8501 React

Families of AirAsia Flight 8501 React

Family members of passengers and crew on AirAsia Flight 8501 grieved after Indonesian officials confirmed that the debris and bodies spotted in the Java Sea were from the missing plane.

Video by Reuters on Publish Date December 30, 2014. Photo by Beawiharta/Reuters.

 

 

“My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ 8501,” Tony Fernandes, the head of AirAsia, wrote in a Twitter message soon after the debris was found. “On behalf of AirAsia my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am.”

Mr. Fernandes said later that he did not want to speculate about the cause until the plane’s flight recorders were recovered and analyzed, though he said that “bad weather is the short-term conclusion — weather in Southeast Asia is bad now.”

As news spread of the discoveries in the sea, some relatives of passengers stood despondently outside the airport in Surabaya.

“I’m still hoping my brother is safe,” said Ifan Joko, standing in a light drizzle outside the terminal where relatives and friends had gathered since Sunday.

His brother, Charly Gunawan, who was traveling to Singapore for the New Year’s holiday, was among the 162 people on board.

“If the passengers are dead, I want the bodies brought back to Surabaya,” Mr. Ifan said. “I will pay the bill myself if I have to.”

 

 

 

Aboard AirAsia Flight 8501

The airline said in a statement that the flight was carrying 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, as well as a crew of seven, including two pilots. Here is how they break down by nationality.

  • 155 Indonesians:

    • One was the pilot, Iriyanto. AirAsia said he had 20,537 hours' flying experience, including 6,100 with AirAsia.

    • He was described as a fan of motorcycles and a devoted member of his local mosque.

    • His younger brother had died recently.

  • 3 South Koreans:

    The Telegraph newspaper of England reported that the three were a family of Christian missionaries from a fishing village.

  • 1 Briton:

    BBC said Choi Chi-man, a British businessman based in Hong Kong, was on the flight.

    • He was reportedly traveling with his two-year-old daughter Zoe, whose nationality was not immediately clear.

  • 1 Frenchman

    • France’s Foreign Ministry said the flight's copilot was a French citizen.

    News reports said his name was Rémi Emmanuel Plesel.

    • AirAsia said he had 2,275 hours' flying experience with the airline.

  • 1 Malaysian

  • 1 Singaporean

 

 

The crash was a particular loss to Surabaya’s ethnic Chinese minority. Flights from Surabaya to Singapore serve as shuttles for residents here who do business in Singapore or have family members there. The air disaster seems also to have also disproportionately affected Surabaya’s Christian community.

Leaders of Bethany, a large church in a wealthy neighborhood on the outskirts of Surabaya, pored over the plane’s manifest when it was released on Sunday and determined that at least five passengers were members of families who attend the church.

Deddy, a church pastor, said the crash was a tragedy for all of Indonesia. “We can guess from the names that many are Christian and Chinese,” he said.

If passengers from both the AirAsia plane and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the jet that disappeared in March, are included in the calculations, 1,320 people died in air accidents in 2014, the deadliest year since 2005, according to the Bureau of Aircraft Incidents Archives, an organization that tracks aviation accidents.

Over all, the number of airline crashes has been on a downward trend for several decades despite the rapid growth in air traffic. There have been 111 crashes around the world in 2014, the fewest in any year since 1927.

Even so, the two-day delay in finding the AirAsia wreckage seems likely to add to the pressure on airlines to do more, by equipping their aircraft with devices that report their location coordinates and other diagnostic information more frequently.

Miles Gerety, a lawyer in Connecticut, said calls for more data streaming from aircraft had been heard since at least 1998, when a Swissair flight crashed on its way to Geneva from New York and some data was lost from the data recorder on board.

Mr. Gerety, whose brother died in that crash, recently sailed across the Atlantic on a 35-foot boat with a device that regularly transmitted his position.

“The technology to update a vessel’s position every minute, 30 seconds or even one second is readily available and cheap,” he said by email.

Tom McCawley contributed reporting from Jakarta, Indonesia, Michael Forsythe contributed from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/world/asia/airasia-8501-jet-missing-indonesia.html