AirAsia jet rescue thwarted as lifting balloons fail
Print Edition
INDONESIAN rescuers yesterday lifted the fuselage of the crashed AirAsia jet nearly to the water’s surface before it sank to the ocean floor again when the lifting balloons deflated, a setback in the effort to recover victims’ remains.
Four bodies were discovered though in the area where dozens of divers struggled with strong currents and poor visibility to prepare to retrieve the 30-meter-long wreckage, said S. B. Supriyadi, operations chief at the National Search and Rescue Agency.
Divers reached the fuselage for the first time on Friday and retrieved six bodies. A total of 69 bodies have now been recovered from AirAsia flight 8501, which crashed on December 28 with 162 people on board while flying from Surabaya in Indonesia to Singapore.
Authorities believe many of the other bodies are still inside the fuselage.
“We now need additional balloons,” Supriyadi said after yesterday’s setback.
The cockpit was reported to be about 500m from the fuselage at a depth of 30m and the bodies of the pilot and co-pilot might be inside, he said.
Media reports said the fuselage was lifted to about 7m from the surface before some of the balloons failed.
Some passengers’ belongings and aircraft parts floated out as the fuselage was being lifted, the detik.com website reported.
Bad weather is a suspected factor in the crash. Just before the flight disappeared, the pilots asked to climb to a higher altitude to avoid threatening clouds, but were denied permission because of heavy traffic in the area.
Investigators are analyzing data from the aircraft’s data recorders with advisers from Airbus, the plane’s manufacturer.
Tatang Kurniadi, head of the National Transportation Safety Committee, said a preliminary report on the accident is expected to be submitted to the International Civil Aviation Organization next week. A full analysis of what went wrong could take up to a year, he said.
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