Update | Pings detected in search for AirAsia jet’s black box, says Indonesia

Signals thought to be pings from the black box flight recorders of AirAsia flight QZ8501 picked up by Indonesian search and rescue teams operating in the Java Sea

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Ping signals from the black box data recorders of crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501 were detected on Friday, a senior Indonesian search official said. Photo: AFP

Published: 12:15pm, 9 Jan 2015Updated: 7:54pm, 9 Jan 2015

Indonesia search and rescue teams hunting for the wreck of the missing AirAsia passenger jet flight QZ8501 detected pings in their efforts to find the black box flight recorders on Friday, an official said, 12 days after the plane went missing with 162 people on board.

Flight QZ8501 vanished from radar screens on December 28, less than half way into a two-hour flight from Indonesia’s second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. There were no survivors.

Forty-eight bodies, including at least two still strapped to their seats, have been found in waters off Borneo, but strong winds and high waves have hampered efforts to reach larger pieces of suspected wreckage detected by sonar on the sea floor.

The body of a passenger is carried on a stretcher after at the airbase in Pangkalan Bun. Forty eight corpses had been recovered by Friday. Photo: Reuters

The Airbus A320-200 carries the cockpit voice and flight data recorders near the tail section. Officials had warned, however, that they could have become separated from the tail.

Santoso Sayogo, an investigator at the National Transportation Safety Committee, said it appeared that the flight recorders were no longer in the tail.

“We received an update from the field that the pinger locator already detected pings,” he told reporters.