Rescuers Find 30 AirAsia Flight Victims, Some Still Strapped to Seats
Families continue to mourn the downing of AirAsia flight 8501 after Indonesian authorities found 30 bodies floating near wreckage in the Java Sea.
Friday proved to be one of the most successful rescue days this week, with teams, including a U.S. Navy ship, discovering 21 bodies at the bottom of the sea near where other wreckage, including life vests and airplane doors, were discovered.
Authorities said that some of the bodies recovered from the ocean shore were still strapped into their plane seats.
Now authorities are searching for the plane's black box to determine how the commercial airliner carrying 162 passengers went down on Sunday morning during its two hour flight from Indonesia to Singapore.
The last communication between the plane and air traffic control was when pilots requested an elevation spike after encountering storm clouds. Officials are now saying that the plane's coordinates appear to show that the aircraft took an impossibly steep incline before plummeting into the ocean.
Toos Saniotoso, an Indonesian air safety investigator, told the Associated Press that investigators "are looking at every aspect" to try to determine how the low-cost commercial airliner crashed. "From the operational side, the human factor, the technical side, the ATC (air-traffic control) everything is valuable to us."
According to BBC News, a French crash investigation team has moved in to help Indonesian authorities find the black box by using acoustic detection devices on the ocean's floor.
Ongoing stormy weather has caused choppy seas and large waves, causing investigators to search for the plane's wreckage internally, instead of visually, in the relatively shallow Java Sea.
