'High probability' that missing plane tail found

Discovery has yet to be confirmed as route license mystery deepens

An Indonesian naval patrol vessel found what the captain said could be the tail of a missing AirAsia jet on Monday. The crucial black box voice and flight data recorders are normally located in that section of an aircraft.

Ships and aircraft seeking debris and bodies widened their search area to allow for ocean currents eight days after flight QZ8501 plunged into the Java Sea en route from Surabaya, Indonesia's second-biggest city, to Singapore, with 162 people aboard.

"We found what has a high probability of being the tail of the plane," the patrol vessel captain, Yayan Sofyan, told reporters. The Indonesian search and rescue agency was yet to confirm the discovery.

Indonesia's meteorological agency said seasonal tropical storms probably contributed to the Dec 28 crash. Ongoing bad weather has persistently hampered efforts to recover bodies and find the voice and flight data recorders, which should explain why the plane crashed into the sea.

Weather blamed

The main focus of the search is about 167 kilometers off the coast of Borneo, where five large objects believed to be parts of the plane - the largest about 18 meters long - have been pinpointed in shallow waters by ships using sonar.

Peter Marosszeky, a senior aviation research fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, said the weather was squarely to blame for the delay in finding the recorders, which are designed to emit pings that can be detected by sonar for a month after a crash.

"The seas haven't been very friendly, but the black boxes have a 30-day life, and they will be able to find them, particularly in the shallow waters," he said. "It's the weather that is causing the delay."

Indonesia AirAsia, which is 49 percent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia, has come under pressure from authorities, as its Surabaya-Singapore license was suspended on grounds that the carrier only had permission to fly the route on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Flight QZ8501 took off on a Sunday.

It was not immediately clear what difference, if any, the day of the week had on the Dec 28 flight. Djoko Murjatmodjo, acting director general of air transportation, made clear that the investigations of the route and the crash were separate.

"Please differentiate between the probe into flight licenses and the air crash investigation," he said, adding that any other airline that flew on a day it did not have permission to do so would have its license frozen.

"AirAsia is clearly wrong because they didn't fly at a time and schedule that was already determined," Murjatmodjo said. "We hope to finish the investigation soon on whether anything went wrong."

Reuters - AFP