Until AirAsia Flight QZ8501 wreckage is found, there will be "a lot of unknowns"

The search for AsiaAir Flight QZ8501 continues, though experts fear the worst. The Indonesia search and rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo even commented that the plane is most likely "at the bottom of the sea."

However, until the wreckage - and the plane's black boxes - are located, "there's going to be a lot of unknowns," former National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said on CBSN.

One of the crucial pieces of information accident investigators have to work with are diagnostics fed from the plane's aircraft communications and reporting system (A-CARS). The A-CARS provides updates in weather, changes in flight plan, and the overall health of the aircraft, which may show what happened to the plane up to when ground control lost contact with it.

According to former NTSB Chairman Mark Rosenker, there was most likely a chain of events resulting in the presumed catastrophe. "Accidents are never one thing. We always see what we call an accident chain - a link," Rosenker said. "A number of things came together to create this terrible tragedy."

AirAsia Flight QZ8501's disappearance follows the March vanishing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the wreckage of which has still not been located. While many lessons were learned from flight MH370, there are still improvements in communication and tracking that the airline industry needs to make.

"[Airlines] still don't have a good tracking system for aircraft that are out over dead space," Hersman said. With the technology available, Rosenker suggested that basic aircraft diagnostics should be continuously streamed to a remote online storage location, which ground control could access in the case of an emergency.

Right now, the black boxes are pivotal in discovering the fate of the Flight QZ8501. The black boxes will ping their location for 30 days before going silent, making time a pertinent factor in the investigation. Fortunately, the Java Sea's relatively shallow sea floor of 150 feet is favorable for this type of search.