AirAsia victim with life jacket raises questions about plane's last moments

Search and rescue team members stand by as a helicopter prepares to land, during search operations for passengers onboard AirAsia flight QZ8501, at Iskandar airbase in Pangkalan Bun district, Indonesia, December 31, 2014. [Photo/Agencies]

SURABAYA, Indonesia/JAKARTA - A body recovered on Wednesday from the crashed AirAsia plane was wearing a life jacket, an official with Indonesia's search and rescue agency said, raising questions about how the disaster unfolded.

Rescuers believe they have found the plane on the ocean floor off Borneo, after sonar detected a large, dark object beneath waters near where debris and bodies were found on the surface.

Ships and planes had been scouring the Java Sea for Flight QZ8501 since Sunday, when it lost contact during bad weather about 40 minutes into its flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

Seven bodies have been recovered from the sea, some fully clothed, which could indicate the Airbus A320-200 was intact when it hit the water. That would support a theory that it suffered an aerodynamic stall.

The fact that one person put on a life jacket would appear to indicate those on board had at least some time before the aircraft hit the water, or after it hit the water and before it sank.

And yet the pilots did not issue a distress signal. The plane disappeared after it failed to get permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather because of heavy air traffic.

"This morning, we recovered a total of four bodies and one of them was wearing a life jacket," Tatang Zaenudin, an official with the search and rescue agency, said.

He declined to speculate on what the find might mean.

Hernanto, head of the search and rescue agency in Surabaya, said rescuers believed they had found the plane on the sea bed with a sonar scan in water about 30 to 50 metres (100 to 165 feet) deep. The black box flight data and cockpit voice recorder has yet to be found.