AirAsia Plane Debris and Bodies Are Found in sea.

'Several bodies recovered and floating debris spotted in search for missing AirAsia plane in Java Sea.

Family members of passengers onboard missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 cry at a waiting area in Juanda International Airport, Surabaya December 30, 2014. 

CREDIT: REUTERS/BEAWIHARTA

SURABAYA, Indonesia —Search teams have recovered at least 40 bodies and numerous pieces of wreckage from missing AirAsia plane  as search teams said that a “shadow” has been spotted on the seabed on Tuesday.  But it remained unknown what caused AirAsia Flight 8501 to plunge into the sea on Sunday less than an hour after taking off from the Surabaya airport.

“I am so very sorry for this accident,” Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president, said before meeting with families of passengers here. “I hope families can stay strong while facing tragedy.”

Throughout the afternoon, the Indonesian authorities built up an inventory of debris collected by ships and helicopters from the sea surface: life vests, aircraft parts and what appeared to be a small blue suitcase. Indonesian television showed a rescuer descending from a helicopter toward a corpse, which like other bodies found was not wearing a life jacket.

The Indonesian authorities said the pieces of wreckage were found about 60 miles southeast of the last known position of the plane — the opposite direction from the plane’s path, a fact that was not explained. Search teams also spotted what they said might be a larger submerged piece of the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200, which was operated by the Indonesian affiliate of AirAsia.

The crash was a particular loss to Surabaya’s ethnic Chinese community. Flights from Surabaya to Singapore serve as shuttles for residents here who do business in Singapore or have family members there. The air disaster seems to have also disproportionately affected Surabaya’s Christian community.

Leaders of Bethany, a massive, three-story megachurch in a wealthy neighborhood on the outskirts of Surabaya, pored over the plane’s manifest when it became available on Sunday and determined that at least five passengers were members of families who attend the church.

Deddy, one of the church pastors, said the crash was a tragedy for all of Indonesia. But, he said, “We can guess from the names that many are Christian and Chinese.”

If passengers from both the AirAsia plane and the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in March are included in the calculations, 1,320 people died in air accidents in 2014, the deadliest year since 2005, according to the Bureau of Aircraft Incidents Archives, an organization that tracks aviation accidents.

But the number of fatalities this year has been heavily skewed by the AirAsia crash and two Malaysia Airlines disasters — another of the airline’s jets was shot down over Ukraine in July with 298 people aboard — which taken together made up 60 percent of all aviation deaths in 2014.

Over all, advances in aviation safety remain encouraging — the number of airline crashes has been on a downward trend for several decades. There were 111 crashes in 2014, and by this measure it was the safest year since 1927 — a remarkable decline given the exponential growth in air traffic.

The two-day delay in locating the AirAsia wreckage, however, seems likely to add to pressure on airlines to equip their aircraft with devices that send out location coordinates and other diagnostic information.

On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The co-pilot was French.

U.S. law enforcement and security officials said passenger and crew lists were being examined but nothing significant had turned up and the incident was regarded as an unexplained accident. Indonesia AirAsia is 49 percent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia.

The AirAsia group, including affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines and India, had not suffered a crash since its Malaysian budget operations began in 2002. - 

“The technology to update a vessel’s position every minute, 30 seconds or even one second is readily available and cheap,” he said by email. - Reuters