4th LD Writethru: Black box signals believed from crashed AirAsia plane detected, fuselage maybe found

Three Indonesian ships detected signals possibly from crashed AirAsia flight QZ8501 again near an area where an object believed to be the fuselage of the plane was located, an Indonesian official said on Sunday.

Operational director of the National Search and Rescue Agency, Suryadi B. Supriyadi, said the pings were detected 1 km east of the location where the broken tail was lifted from the sea off Indonesia's Central Kalimantan coast on Saturday.

An object believed to be the main body of the jetliner had also been detected close to the area from where the pings were emitting and divers will be deployed to check the signals, he said at an operation base in Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan.

Another official at Indonesia's Research and Technology Application Agency (BPPT) Ridwan Djamaluddin told local TV station MetroTV that the exact location of the suspected black boxes was 30 meters below the surface.

"The distance is between 1 to 4 kilometers from the initial location of the tail part when it was found," Ridwan said.

He added that those three Indonesian ships detected the ping signals from the same source strongly suspected to be the black boxes of the doomed AirAsia plane.

If weather condition in the search area permits, authorities said they hoped divers would retrieve what were believed to be the black boxes of the ill-fated plane Monday, according to local media.

Ping signals possibly from black boxes of the Airbus A320-200 were detected by Indonesian search ships on Friday, some 300 meters from the location where the tail was discovered. But they have not been confirmed.

The flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as black boxes, are crucial to helping determine the cause of the air crash. The devices, which are stored in the rear of the aircraft, can still send signals for two weeks before the battery goes dead.

Flight QZ8501, with 162 people aboard, went down in the Java Sea near the Karimata Strait during its flight from Surabaya to Singapore on Dec. 28.

A multinational search operation was underway to retrieve wreckage and bodies of the victims, joined by ships and planes from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Japan, Australia, Russia, South Korea and China.

So far, 48 bodies have been recovered from the sea, with at least 27 of them having been identified. Endi