Divers have located the empennage section of AirAsia Flight 8501, Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said on Wednesday local time. It’s not yet known if the wreckage found contains the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, which are normally located in the rear of the aircraft. Nor did the agency say whether acoustic equipment had detected pinging from the recorders’ underwater acoustic beacons.
Photos released by BASARNAS, the rescue agency, revealed large sections of wreckage, including an identifiable tail number that matched that of the AirAsia Airbus 320, which disappeared on a flight to Singapore on December 28. All 162 passengers and crew are believed to have been killed when the aircraft impacted the Java Sea off the west coast of Borneo.
This image from BASARNAS shows what appears to be part of AirAsia’s logo on a piece of submerged wreckage.
Meanwhile, the French accident investigator who was in charge of the Air France 447 investigation told NBC News on Wednesday local time that the size and pattern of the wreckage and the fact that recovered bodies appear relatively intact suggests that the aircraft impacted the water in a horizontal attitude. Jean-Paul Troadec told NBC that the impact probably “was not very violent.”
“The pieces of the aircraft are not so fragmented, it’s quite large pieces,” he said. “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 said.
Air France 447, an Airbus 330, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009. After a two-year search to locate the flight and data recorders, investigators determined that the crew responded incorrectly after the aircraft’s autopilot was knocked offline due to pitot tube icing. The aircraft struck the water in a relatively flat, stall condition.
