Expert Suggests AirAsia 8501 Was Horizontal During Crash

As the search for fragments of the missing AirAsia 8501 flight continues, an expert is suggesting that the commercial airliner was horizontal when it crashed into the Java Sea over two weeks ago.

Jean-Paul Troadec, who previously led an investigation into what downed Air France 447 in 2009, told NBC News that he believes AirAsia 8501 landed onto the water horizontally, based on the relatively-good condition of much of the wreckage, as well as the state of the bodies recovered from the plane.

"The pieces of the aircraft are not so fragmented, it's quite large pieces," he told NBC News. "The fact that the bodies seem intact means most probably that the impact was not very violent and that the airplane was probably horizontal when it crashed into the sea."

Troadec went on to say that he believes the plane may have glided onto the sea, and search and rescue teams' inability to find the plane's important black box may be due to the fact that the box is buried at the bottom of the muddy Java Sea.

The expert's suggestion that the plane landed horizontally on the water comes after Indonesian authorities announced in late December that they believe the plane may have made an impossibly steep climb before it plummeted into the ocean.

"So far, the numbers taken by the radar are unbelievably high. This rate of climb is very high, too high. It appears to be beyond the performance envelope of the aircraft," an anonymous source close to the investigation told Reuters.