Flight 8501: More wreckage, bodies recovered

After five days of rough weather, search teams have found two big parts of AirAsia Flight 8501, which crashed into the Java Sea last Sunday with 162 people on board.

Indonesian search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo said the huge recovery operation came across two large object measuring 9.4m by 4.8m by 0.4m and 7.2m by 0.5m respectively.

"With the discovery of an oil spill and two big parts of the aircraft, I can assure you these are the parts of the AirAsia plane we have been looking for," he said.

"As I speak we are lowering an ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle) underwater to get an actual picture of the objects detected on the sea floor. All are at the depth of 30 metres.”

He added however that a strong current was making it difficult to operate the ROV.

Rough weather has hampered the search for bodies and the fuselage of the Airbus A320-200 since the crash area was first detected on Wednesday.

So far 30 bodies have been recovered in the search, which had been narrowed on Friday to an area of 1575 square nautical miles, a tenth of the size of Thursday's search area, with 29 ships and 17 aircraft engaged in the operation.

Finding the plane's black boxes is crucial to determining the cause of the crash.

Experts have speculated the plane, which was flying through a monsoon storm, landed intact on the sea but was swamped before many passengers could get out. The first debris found was an exit door and an escape shute.

Flying on 'unauthorised schedule'
Meanwhile, Indonesia's transport ministry says the AirAsia Indonesia plane was flying on an unauthorised schedule when it crashed, adding it had now frozen the airline's permission to fly the route.

Flight QZ8501 crashed en route from Indonesia's second largest city Surabaya to Singapore early on Sunday morning at a flight time that had not been cleared by officials, director general of air transport Djoko Murjatmodjo said.

"It violated the route permit given, the schedule given, that's the problem," he said.

"AirAsia's permit for the route has been frozen because it violated the route permit given."

This would continue until investigations were completed.