Officials confident of location of AirAsia Flight 8501 black boxes

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia - Divers returned to the water Monday hoping to locate the black boxes from the crashed AirAsia plane after zeroing in on the site where the devices are believed to be wedged beneath wreckage on the bottom of the Java Sea.

Three Indonesian ships heard intense pings a day earlier in an area up to 5 kilometers (3 miles) from where the aircraft's tail was earlier discovered. Divers spent 12 hours at a depth of 30 meters (100 feet) trying to find the cockpit voice and flight data recorders on Sunday, but murky water and strong currents kept them from seeing it, said Suryadi Bambang Supriyadi, operation coordinator at the national search and rescue agency.

However, officials are now confident the black boxes are there, based on two signals detected near each other. They are believed to be lodged under debris from the aircraft, which plummeted into the Java Sea on Dec. 28, killing all 162 people on board. The cause of the crash is not yet known, though bad weather is believed to have been a factor.

"Divers will attempt to recover the black boxes by gradually shifting these layers of debris from the plane's body," Supriyadi said, "Hopefully, weather and sea currents are friendly today, so our drivers can retrieve this very important instrument."

If that plan fails, Supriyadi said, divers would lift the wreckage using inflatable balloons, the same technique used to recover the tail section on Saturday. The devices, which are key to understanding what brought Flight 8501 down, apparently detached from the plane's rear during the crash.

Nurcahyo Utomo, an investigator at the National Committee for Safety Transportation, said when the black boxes are found, they will be taken to Jakarta, the capital, for analysis. It could take up to two weeks to download their recorded data.

In addition, sonar on Sunday detected a large object in the same vicinity as the pings. Officials initially were hopeful it was the main section of the Airbus A320's cabin, but divers confirmed it was instead a wing and debris from an engine, said Henry Bambang Soelistyo, chief of Indonesia's search and rescue agency.

Several other large objects have been spotted in the search area by sonar, but they have not yet been confirmed with underwater visuals.

Search efforts have been consistently hampered by big waves and powerful currents created by the region's rainy season. Silt and sand, along with river runoff, have created blinding conditions for divers.

Officials believe most of the victims' bodies are likely entombed inside the aircraft on the seabed. So far, 48 corpses have been recovered.

Three more bodies were identified Sunday, including Park Seongbeom, 37, and his wife, Lee Kyung Hwa, 34, from South Korea, said Budiyono, who heads East Java's Disaster Victim Identification unit and, like many Indonesians, uses only one name.

He said they were discovered Friday on the seabed, still strapped to their seats. Their baby has not yet been found, but the infant's carrier was still attached to the man.

Sixteen recovered corpses remain unidentified, partially due to decomposition, Budiyono said. Nearly all of the passengers were Indonesian.

The last contact the pilots had with air traffic control, about halfway into their two-hour journey from Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya, to Singapore, indicated they were entering stormy weather. They asked to climb from 32,000 feet (9,753 meters) to 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) to avoid threatening clouds, but were denied permission because of heavy air traffic. Four minutes later, the plane dropped off the radar. No distress signal was sent.