• Indonesian Officials: AirAsia Plane Climbed Too Fast, Likely Stalled Out

    About a week after finding and recovering the black boxes from AirAsia Flight 8501, investigators are beginning to put together a solid idea of what led to the demise of the plane. It had been reported almost immediately after the flight went missing that storms in the area and bad weather conditions had prompted the pilot to ask to climb from 32,000 feet up to 38,000 feet but was initially denied. Indonesian officials are now saying that the pilot did climb 6,000 feet in just one minute, and that likely caused the airbus to stall out.

  • Tail Has Been Found for Missing AirAsia Plane

    Finally, conditions for the search and recovery of lost AirAsia Flight 8501 have improved enough for divers to spot the tail of the plane. It has been located about 20 miles from the craft's last known location and resting at the bottom of the Java Sea. This is particularly promising news because if it is the right side of the tail, then the black box will likely be recovered with it. That recovery is crucial in helping investigators understand exactly what happened in the final moments of the doomed flight. "We've found the tail that has been our main target," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of the search and rescue agency, said at a news conference in Jakarta. The tail was identified by divers after it was spotted by an underwater machine using a sonar scan, Soelistyo said. He displayed underwater photographs showing partial lettering on the sunken object compared with a picture of an intact Airbus A320-200 in AirAsia livery. "I can confirm that what we found was the tail part from the pictures," he said, adding that the team "now is still desperately trying to locate the black box," according to a report by Reuters. So far, monsoon-like rain and minimal visibility has made recovering the bodies of the 162 passengers on board difficult, and divers have been frustrated to know that they are so close yet have not been able to fully do their job.
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