The Airbus A320-200 crashed during a storm en route from Indonesia’s second city Surabaya to Singapore, and relief workers are hunting for flight data recorders to determine the cause of the crash.
An initial report on the website of BMKG, Indonesia’s meteorological agency, suggests the weather at the time the plane went down sparked the disaster after it appeared to fly into storm clouds.
“Based on the available data received on the location of the aircraft’s last contact, the weather was the triggering factor behind the accident,” said the report.
“The most probable weather phenomenon was icing which can cause engine damage due to a cooling process. This is just one of the possibilities that occurred based on the analysis of existing meteorological data,” it said.
High seas throughout the week have hampered the relief process, a huge operation assisted by several countries including the United States and Russia, but divers were preparing to go down to the wreckage today as the weather cleared.
Four major parts of the Airbus A320-200 were found in the sea off the island of Borneo late Friday and yesterday, raising hopes that the remaining bodies and the crucial “black box” recorders would soon be located. So far 30 bodies have been found.
“The waves are calmer, only one to two metres high,” search and rescue official SB Supriyadi said, adding that 95 divers were on standby on various ships.
“We’ll be concentrating on the underwater search. Hopefully we’ll be able to evacuate more bodies. We want to speed up the evacuation of bodies that might be stuck inside the plane’s body,” he said.
He said they would be using sonar equipment in their underwater searches, while aircraft would continue to scour the sea and coastline.
A presentation shown to reporters yesterday described one of the debris pieces as the “suspected tail” of the plane, but strong currents had made it difficult to operate a remotely-operated underwater vehicle to get a picture of the objects, which are 30 metres underwater.
Indonesia has pledged to investigate flight violations by AirAsia, saying the ill-fated aircraft had been flying on an unauthorised schedule when it crashed. The airline has now been suspended from flying the Surabaya-Singapore route.
But the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore said it had granted permission for the airline’s Sunday flight.
It was unclear how the airline, a unit of Malaysia-based AirAsia, had been able to fly without the necessary authorisation from its starting point.
The company has declined to comment until the probe is complete, but said it would “fully cooperate” with the government.