Rescue officials find tail of missing AirAsia plane

The head of Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said Wednesday that the tail of AirAsia Flight 8501 had been spotted in the Java Sea, a development that could be significant because the plane’s so-called black boxes were contained there, The New York Timesreports.

“The tail section has been found and confirmed,” the official, Bambang Soelistyo, said at a news conference.

He said that the object was identified by sonar early Wednesday and that navy divers and a remote-controlled underwater vehicle had been deployed to confirm the discovery. The team took a photograph of what Soelistyo said was part of the tail, and it was broadcast on national television.

Flight 8501, an Airbus A320-200, crashed into the Java Sea on December 28 with 162 people aboard, less than an hour after taking off from the Indonesian city of Surabaya bound for Singapore.

The cause of the crash remains unclear, though weather has been cited as a likely factor, and officials hope that recovering the plane’s voice and flight data recorders, or black boxes, will shed light on what happened. Soelistyo said that with the tail now identified, the search would focus intently on retrieving the recorders from it.

Intermittent bad weather has slowed the process of identifying wreckage and recovering bodies. As of Wednesday, 40 bodies had been recovered, Soelistyo said. But he added that he expected many corpses would be found within the wreckage and that divers would be on standby to begin retrieving them as soon as more parts of the plane were located.

Though conditions were good enough Wednesday morning to allow divers to investigate the newly discovered wreckage, by afternoon the weather had worsened and stalled the search again. It also put on hold plans to retrieve the tail using cranes.