Singapore says navy ship has located AirAsia fuselage
Ng Eng Hen said in a statement on Facebook that Singapore's chief of navy told him the plane's fuselage was located by one of the country's vessels.
He said images taken by a remotely operated vehicle show part of the aircraft's wing and words on the fuselage. The Indonesian search and rescue authority has been informed of the find, and can now begin recovery operations, he added.
Bambang Soelistyo, Indonesia's National Search and Rescue chief, said the fuselage was spotted by search teams on Tuesday, the BBC reported.
"The accident is a tragic event resulting in the loss of manylives," Ng said Wednesday. "I hope that with the fuselage located, some form of closure can come to the families of the victims to ease their grief."
On Tuesday Bambang told families that the search operations for the plane would soon be scaled back but that the effort to recover the bodies of victims will continue.
It came the same day divers retrieved the flight's cockpit voice recorder from the seafloor. The other black box — the data recorder — was previously brought to the surface, and both have been sent to Jakarta for study.
Authorities hope the black boxes will help determine why the Singapore-bound jet plummeted into the Java Sea less than an hour out of Surabaya, Indonesia, amid heavy storms on Dec. 28. All 162 passengers and crew are presumed dead.
On Saturday, the tail of the plane was lifted from the seafloor and taken to Pangkalan Bun, the nearest town, to be handed over to Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee for investigation. Ng said the underwater search team said their sonar first detected the fuselage about 1 mile from where the tail was found. He said the wreckage, with wings, was about 85-foot long.
AirAsia said 48 bodies have been recovered so far and 36 of the remains have been identified.The Indonesian Transport Ministry has said AirAsia did not have a license to fly the route on the day of the crash, a claim AirAsia Indonesia had vigorously disputed. In testimony this week before the Indonesian parliament, however, airline president Sunu Widyatmoko acknowledged that due to an "administrative mistake" the airline had only verbally proposed a schedule change to allow Sunday flights.
The airline has been banned from flying the Surabaya-Singapore route. The Transport Ministry has suspended scores of routes from other domestic airlines for similar alleged violations.