Indonesia search and rescue teams hunting for the wreck of an AirAsia passenger jet have located two "big objects" in the Java Sea, agency chief Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo told reporters on Saturday.
The two objects found just before midnight on Friday are around 30 metres (90 feet) underwater and the agency is attempting to get images using remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROV), Soelistyo told a news conference in Jakarta. An Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320-200 plunged into the Java Sea on Sunday while en route from Indonesia's second-biggest city Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board. No survivors have been found.
"We have detected two objects underwater (at) 30 metres depth," said Soelistyo. "At this moment we are operating the ROV to take pictures of the objects."
The first object measures 9.4 metres by 4.8 metres by 0.4 metres (30 feet by 15 feet by 1.3 feet), while the second is 7.2 metres by 0.5 metres (24 feet by 1.6 feet), he said.
Soelistyo said operating ROVs was problematic due to the large waves in the area, but that divers were preparing to search for the objects. An official said 30 bodies had so far been recovered, some still strapped in their seatbelts, along with pieces of the broken-up plane, in the Indonesian-led search for Flight QZ8501 that is concentrated on 1,575 square nautical miles of the northern Java Sea.
Aircraft combed the sea and shoreline off Borneo on Saturday for wreckage hoping to take advantage of a brief break in bad weather that has hampered efforts to find the plane and its black box flight recorders. Investigators hope the voice and flight data will solve the mystery of what happened to Flight QZ8501 as it flew through a severe storm over the Java Sea. "After the black box is found, we are able to issue a preliminary report in one month," said Toos Sanitioso, an investigator with the National Committee for Transportation Safety on Friday. "We cannot yet speculate what caused the crash."
Indonesia's search and rescue agency said the search area had been widened on Saturday as debris may have drifted more than 200 nautical miles, adding helicopters would concentrate on searching the coastline of southern Borneo.
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