The Commander of the Malaysian Naval Forces, Abdul Asis Jafar, reported on his Twitter page that experts have managed to detect “the most probable” area of the crash of an AirAsia airplane.
According to him, the search zone has shifted 30 sea miles to the east; its area is 1.5 thousand cubic sea miles. “Apparently the airplane was lost in this area,” Asis Jafar said. He added that three ships with deepwater search equipment and a group of Indonesian divers have been sent to the area.
According to local press, wreckage of the crashed airplane has been taken to the main base of the search and rescue operation in Pangkalan Bun on Kalimantan.
The EMERCOM of Russia has sent two airplanes – an Il-76 and a Be-200 – to Indonesia. They will carry 72 rescuers to conduct searches in the sea at a depth of 1000 m, according to Alexander Drobyshevsky, an official representative of EMERCOM.
A representative of the National Search and Rescue Agency of Indonesia reports that rescuers have found 22 bodies of passengers and crew members of the crashed airplane. At the moment the process of identification is taking place in Surabaya.
Bad weather conditions are preventing rescuers from actively searching. Divers cannot carry out intensive work due to heavy waves. The “black boxes” of the airplane haven’t been found yet.
At the same time, the authorities of Indonesia aren’t considering the activities supervising the Malaysian airplane by the land services to have been a mistake.
Pilots from different countries stated that the airplane didn’t gain significant speed for gaining height to avoid a storm. An Australian aviation expert Neil Hansford believes that a human factor is the reason for the crash.
According to him, the pilot chose a dangerous route above the Java Sea. The expert says that experienced pilots always avoid the zone where the plane crashed, as there is such a phenomenon as “the storm factory,” and it has to be bypassed. The pilot shouldn’t have tried to pass through it. The expert stresses that it is a fatal mistake.
155 passengers and 7 crew members were flying on an Airbus A320-200 from Surabaya to Singapore on December 28th.
